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Initial Half-Life 2 Benchmarks Released
dfj225 writes "According to an article on ExtremeTech.com, it looks like ATI has the lead in Half-Life 2 graphics card performance. Valve benchmarked their new game using the top cards from both ATI and nVidia. Results show the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro drawing around 60 FPS while the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra only draws around 30 in Half-Life 2's DX9 full precision tests. Read the article to see results on other tests that Valve ran." Update: 09/11 13:06 GMT by M : Another article about the presentation.
It'd be nice to see benchmarks for this game on Linux. They do plan to release it for Linux, right?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I take it you guys have seen the ingame movies? Looks very nice, and seems to take game physics to a whole new level, but at the same time it looks as if you need a Pentium 5 to get it to run properly!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
How is objectivity of this study any different from, say, a study by Microsoft promoting Windows?
What's this Submit thingy do?
Forget ExtremeTech's article, and go check out the one at The Tech Report. According to Gabe Newell of Valve, one of the graphics card companies was trying to detect when a screen shot was being made, so that it could output a higher resolution frame, hiding the quality trade-offs made by the driver. From the article: "He also mentioned that he's seen drivers detect screen capture attempts and output higher quality data than what's actually shown in-game."
Is it just me, or is ATI pulling a real turnaround? They used to be the underdog for so long -- their drivers weren't the greatest, their marketshare was second-fiddle, and they initially missed out on the Xbox contract. I never thought I'd see the day where nVidia, which is practically the industry standard for gaming, might be challenged on such a thing as actual performance.
;-)
Oh well, at least communication between hardware and game developers has improved to the point that I won't need to specify to the game whether I have a Hercules, Tandy, or Trident chipset...
The coolest voice ever.
I refuse to pay through the nose for the highest spec cards. Maybe I'll change my mind when Doom3 comes out.
I've just swapped my old ATI 7200 (76 a couple of years ago) for a GF5200FX (80 a couple of months ago). I'm happy with the new card.
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And just how long will it be before someone finds out that one or both of those video card manufacturers has been "tweaking" their benchmarks to improve the acheived frame rate?
Anyhow, just who runs Half-Life or anything with all the eye candy maxed up? No serious gamers that I know of, that's for sure. At the settings that hardcore FPS addicts play at, the frame rate delivered by any card currently being shipped either ATi or nVidia will be sufficient (assuming that the rest of the system isn't subpar).
Once again, for those of us without money to burn the smart buy is that $100-$200 card that cost $600 a few months ago, not the one that costs $600 now (and which will be down to $100-$200 just as fast).
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
ATI win again. Has been a (relatively)long time since Nvidia had the lead in performance. Better go and get that RADEON i've been promising myself, at least i've got reasonable justification now :)
.
ATi, on the other hand, was a latecomer into 3D and their 3D was always secondary to their 2D performance. But, they've managed to overtake everyone in 3D performance as well.
The best nVidia card is 2x as slow as the best ATi card and ATi card is many months OLDER than ATi's. Nvidia, I'm selling my shares.
What a terrible article. It didn't even say what resolution all that was happening at.
Caffeine Good
nVidia has been circulating its Det50 driver to analysts in hopes that we would use it for our Half-Life 2 benchmarking. The driver contains application-specific optimizations
The article fails to mention whether they actually detect the application and run the driver through a different code path, or if they've made general driver-wide optimizations that happen to also help Half-Life. Knowing the behavior of these video card companies in the past, I would suspect they have huge chunks of code in there devoted soley to Half-Life.
So, now instead of having to hack around and catch companies cheating on drivers, we just have to read as they admit it openly? This is standard operating procedure now???
When I download the latest Detonator drivers for my nVidia card, I want to download a generic D3D/OpenGL driver, not a Half-Life driver. The amount of time they spend "optimizing" for the popular games is time they could have been spending making sure the performance and quality is adequate for ALL games and modeling apps.
I wouldn't value these benchmarks too much, given they're from a game that hasn't yet gone gold. Features could be dropped from the graphics engine that will affect the way each card deals with the graphics.
... you insensitive clod!
Seriously though, are they allowing for people with older cards? (UT 2003 ran fine on my Voodoo3 and still looked pretty darn good, even w/o transparency, anti-aliasing, or any of the other modern GFX buzzwords)
All this boils down to show that nVidia are still strugling with full DX9 support on their chips. It is quiet probable that if the game was based on DX8 instead of 60/30 we had 80/80.
ATI are still ahead in the implementation of DX9 features.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
If a user wants to take a screenshot, shouldn't it be at the highest available resolution? If they can do it with a low overhead, they should. It's the lying on the benchmarks that's the problem here.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
GeForces just don't work right on some systems. I upgraded from a Voodoo3 to a GeForce 3 a couple years ago on a 700Mhz Athlon and went from being pegged at 70fps in Team Fortress and Counter-Strike to dropping as low as 30fps in the same game on the same computer. Now I have a faster computer with a 9800Pro and I'm at 70fps or higher in every game so far. Ready for HL2 and Deus Ex 2. Whoohoo!
It's all very nice seeing how the latest and greatest cards perform but how about some test results for older cards.
I prefer to save my pennies and upgrade my graphics card to the one just behind the current generation.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
...such a test.... the results are here third graph:
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
NIVIDA fanboy: blah blah blah nvidia has better support... blah blah blah!!!
I'm not sure what is going to end first, the Israel-Palestinian situtation or the ATI vs NIVIDA arguement.
The fact is both regularly cheat on performance and quality benchmarks, and if you think you can actually say one is better then the other you are a biased fanboy.
Just buy the one on sale, please.
I want a good framerate and I dont have a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro ... Did they realize that that card was $750 over here? I got two 10k hardrive, a raid card and 512 meg of ram for that price !
Why Nvidia would bother to put chunks of code dedicated to a specific game in the driverset, is beyond me. It would just lead to bloat & other problems down the road.
Remember the 3DFX Mini port drivers? Isn't there some kind of technology that would enable HL2 to run properly on Nvidia hardware using something like this?
Valve Half-Life 2 Benchmark Numbers
[AC: n33d n0 k4rm4]
on the fastest cards on the market ?
I guess my GeForce4 ti4600, which is just over 1 years old, will only get 30fps or so ! Which means I'll be a sitting duck in netgames.
If these are indeeed optimized benchmarks, I doubt we'll see HL2 on the market soon. The'yll have to wait at least untill the R9800 or U5900 become mainstream. (read : at console-level prices)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The thing worng with these benchmarks is they only cover DirectX9. Any self respecting Half-Life player always keeps it in OpenGL mode, especially if it's in the land of NVidia. I can't think of a single game that lets me choose between DirectX and OpenGL where I have chosen OpenGL over the dx. Carmack likes opengl, and he knows more about it than anyone I know.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Actually, it all boils down to:
DX9: Bad
OpenGL: Good
All Valve is doing is making it harder for other OS's to get their games. So I think I speak for all the *nix users when I say they can go fornicate themselves with an iron rod.
This is the LAST time I will enter this argument. You're thinking of the value of FPS the wrong way. If you can render 60 FPS, it takes 1/60 sec. for the gpu to complete all operations on a frame, right? It follows that if you can render 200 FPS, it takes 1/200th sec. for the gpu to complete all operations on a frame. Once the frame is done, all the resources of the system (bus bandwitdh, RAM, CPU load, etc.) are returned to other tasks, not the least of which is USER INPUT.
So, no, your eyeball might night see the difference between 60 and 200 FPS (differences between game and cinema/FMV rendering aside for now,) but the average increase in responsiveness from the system could make a big difference in who gets that railgun shot off first.
Let's also not forget that an intense scene with multiple AI's could half your frame rate. At 60 FPS that takes you into the upper bound of mouse lag and flickering motion. If your're averaging 200 FPS rendering, the same intense scene will be flawless. It is this difference that allows designers to make games more immersive, and add smarter AI.
Take your troll elsewhere.
Maybe ATI is "cheating" and has cards hard wired not to draw things off screen in "Half Life 2.exe"...
Well, if you consider this is an article about Half Life 2 and not about Nvidia's and ATI's open source strategies you might see the interest.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
ATi is bundling HL2 with there cards soon so anything in this article at best gives you an idea as to HL2's performance.
Let's also remember that once ATi was much bigger than nvidia in graphics, and charged exorbitant prices for crappy chips, with shocking driver support.
Let's also remember nvidia have much better performance so far in the more important (and independant) doom3 benchmarks (where 16bit floating point precision is used for nvidia cards, instead of 24 for ati and 32 for nvidia, as directx9 was originally going to specify before nvidia and microsoft fell out).
Also remember that nvidia's cards offer better performance in most 3d rendering apps (where both cards use 32bit fp and almost all of ati's advantages evaporate), so driver tweaking on nv's part in games does not necessarily mean they have a lesser part for that.
Finally linux support is a no brainer, nvidia have been doing it well for years (with support as far back as tnt), ATi have made a recent attempt that is not user friendly, or even support all radeon chipsets, let alone rage 128.
ATi are onto a good thing right now with the current directx9 spec giving them an advantage in games that stick to the spec instead of the optimum end user experience. That is about all they have going for them though. This battle has far from swung the other way, it's merely gotten closer than it used to be.
the DX8 Performance of the older chips
Valve engineers also tested the GeForce 4 Ti 4600 (NV25) here, and its performance was faster than all of the supposedly newer/better GPUs based on the NV3X architecture except for the 5900 Ultra, and nVidia's current top-end GPU was only about 13% faster than the Ti 4600 here.
Have anybody seen a comparison of DirectX8 and DirectX9 visual quality? It doesn't have to be Half-Life2 (although that would be preferable), just something to see what value brings DirectX9 for the player.
I have GeForce Ti4200 (DX8) and it looks like it will be possible to get up to 30FPS in 1024x768, no FSAA. Alternatively, I can get a new Radeon 9600 Pro for 150$ and get the same or better performance in the same resolution, but with DX9 eye-candy and FSAA enabled.
Is it worth it? I assume that the cool demos we've seen have been recorded with DX9. How much worse will the game look in DX8? Any ideas?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Previously their market were attacked by 3Dfx. :)
We know how it ended up
Looks like they'll come through as the winner again this time.
Well done ATI.
I'm really curious on how they managed to survive in this truly ferocious business.. it'd make a really interesting book I think.
vi is better than emacs and WindowMaker is better than both KDE and gnome.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
The screenshots are used by many reviewers to do a detailed comparison of image quality. If a screenshot shows a better quality image than you see in-game, they are no longer useful tools for determining image quality and as such may cause reviewers to draw the wrong conclusions. I agree that for the purpose of chronicling your own adventures, the highest-quality screenshots are nice, but for review purposes they should represent exact in-game quality. Moreover, the difference should be clear to everyone.
If you generate very high quality images which include motion blur then you could get by with 25 or 30 fps. However, it is typically easier to generate twice as many images without motion blur to get aproximately the same effect.
The fact that ATI and Valve are both dual promoting the 9800/9900 and HL2 is a rather disturbing precedent that's being made here. The fact that the Nvidia HL2 benchmarks are so low compared to other DX9 benchmarks suggests that ATI and Valve are doing a little more together then cross-promoting. And although Nvidia is hardly a pillar for honest and open benchmarking ethics, I fear for the day when games are exclusive to video cards just like consoles.
Toms Hardware
FiringSquad
Tech Report
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Beyond 3d
Also, getting over 200 FPS is the best way to brag about your awesome hardware and gigantic penis.
sic transit gloria mundi
Televisions don't actually run at 25 frames per second - they run at (talking PAL here), 50 fields per second, where each field contains half of the picture (1 field takes the odd lines, one takes the even lines, etc).
Each field happens at a different place in time, so on a normal television, you never actually see one "complete" frame.
The advantage is that it increases the amount of temporal information, which humans are more sensitive to.
In order to generate the same amount of temporal information on a computer, you need to update the screen the same number of times as there are fields - 50 fps. This is why you need a high frame rate to reach the same smoothness as television.
I often hear people say "after 30 fps you can't tell the difference", or something to that effect. That might be true if you were playing back the frames evenly spaced. However, your monitor runs at a fixed 60 Hz framerate (or 70 or 80, but let's just say 60), so a "fps" of 50 will have you showing 5 frames, showing the last frame again, and then showing 5 more, which can produce a noticable stutter even though the "fps" is 50. So that is one reason why you might want a "fps" of at least 60 (or 70, or 80). Also, the really meaningful value is "minimum fps", because that is what you're going to get when you're fighting the boss and all these guys are coming at you and all these things are happening at once. Usually, a higher average fps (say, 120) indicates that the minimum fps will also be higher. So, a high fps score can still be good even if your monitor can't display 120 frames every second.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Further for a netgame with double buffering, the small delays between frames quickly become noticable. 30fps is 1000ms/30 ~ 33 milliseconds of delay between each frame (worst case). If your original ping(ok, latency) was 20ms, then I guess the effective latency could be as high as 50ms?
Two points.
First: on a computer monitor 60hz is noticeably flickering, 75hz tolerable for shortish periods. You need 85hz+ for comfort. Its partly a difference in phosphor decay times, partly that you sit much closer to the monitor and stare at it, partly other things.
Second: as the update frequency goes down the lag between actions and seeing the result increases. That puts players at a serious disadvantage regardless of how smooth & flicker free the display might look. In some games the input update frequency can actually affect controller scan rates and even the detailed physics (badly written games but they exist).
You really do want fast update rates.
i could care less if my card hits 30-45FPS or 450FPS.
:) ) and not drop below 30fps on a good day (assuming it's not a long shot of say... phobos2 (VERY pretty lookin' though).
My Ti4200 (4x AGP) card handles UT2003 in 1024x768x32 in 'Holy Shit' Mode (when you set all details to max, the game spits out the announcer's 'holy shit' clip
the rest of the system:
Asus A7N8X-DX mobo (nForce2 chipset)
Athlon XP 2500+ Barton
1GB Kingston Hyper-X RAM (PC2700, dual channel mode)
Visiontek GeForce 4 Ti4200 128MB AGP4x
Sound Blaster Audigy Platinum (running in EAX 5.1 mode)
Windows 2000 Pro SP4
i gave up on trying to milk FPS and high benchmarks out of my system 2 years ago, as i realized that competing with the kid with the Bottomless Bank Account (tm) was futile, thus i focused strictly on everyday performance, and will go to a 9800 or something after the card hits 14 months of active service (march '04).
I have the feeling that HL2 won't give my system much trouble.
The answer. It's back from 1998, but still good.
the thing about it is that lets say the game has a fps of 30, thats an adverage score, which meens there was a high and a low, in some parts the fps may drop to as low as 0 or as higher then 60, if your trying to frag someone and your fps goes down to 3 your in trouble, the higher the fps rating is the higher the min fps is
Aren't the 5xxx series of cards the first ones to incorporate 3dfx technology? I'm willing to bet this is one of the bigger reasons we're starting to see nVidia slide down the performance slope.
I've been a fan of nVidia since the TNT days, but once ATI gets their driver act completely cleaned up, I just might find myself jumping the fence since their performance seems to have surpassed that of their competitors.
These results mirror 3DMark03-results perfectly. It seems that NV's DX9-support is horribly broken. Why else would their cards need separate codepath (In HL2 and in D3(Although D3 is OpenGL-game, it uses many of the same features)) whereas Ati-cards do not? Carmack has said that if D3 does not use the NV-specific codepath, NV-cards will have poor performance.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it outputs a 1600x1200 picture, then it's providing "the highest available resolution". If you take a screenshot while running at 1280x1024, and it gives you the same size image but with all the ugly "trade visual quality for speed without the user's request" hacks turned off, then it's just lying.
a "screenshot" should capture what is on the "screen" and save that to an image file. That's what a screenshot has been historically, and it's what people expect from similarly named features. What you're talking about would be an entirely different feature. You're talking about "Render this scene to a file", in which case you might want to increase the resolution or quality settings. What would be a more valuable feature in certain games would be something like "Render this entire map to a file." The thought being of course that you would create an image that showed the entire map while the screen would only show a portion. What was done in this case is so clearly a dodge. They know that hardware sites often measure image quality of cards by taking screen captures and comparing the images and they were just trying to hide their warts.
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
1) The fps number is an average. If you average 25fps, then when things get busy on screen the rate can drop to 15 or something, which is very visible and ugly. I you run at 60, that doesn't happen.
2) 25fps looks bad for rapid movement and panning (ie, most games). Next time you watch a film, look at how blurry everything looks when the camera pans rapidly.
You don't see jittering on a TV because it's properly filtered in time instead of "point sampled" in time. Nothing to do with framerate or resolution. You don't see jittering on 24fps film either, but pan the camera quickly and it looks like ass. That's the big reason you need higher framerates in an FPS - to handle camera panning. Jittering will be fixed on future gfx cards, but they'll still look like ass at 25fps if you pan the camera fast.
Considering ATI just won the the XBOX2 contract with Microsoft (last month?), AND Valve just signed some OEM deal with ATI, AND the past week has seen Valve and Microsoft have been patting each other's backs about DX9 benchmarking via Half-Life 2, there would appear to be some clear conflicts of interest going on here.
I'm still disappointed in NVidia, and might wind up cancelling the GFX 5900 Ultra order I placed this morning before reading all this (talk about timing) and going for a 9800 Pro, but these numbers ought to be taken with a grain of salt.
FYI
Actually, ATI did just release some new Linux drivers but maybe a week ago at most. Get them here: http://www.ati.com/support/driver.html
Oh yes because the vast amount of PC gamers use Linux. Get real, they are merely catering to those that make up the vast majority instead of wasting money to let a few Linux gamers, and rightfully so.
I'm not 100% certain about the specific cards tested, but for several of the highest end NVIDIA and ATI cards a head-to-head comparison for performance doesn't tell the whole story.
This is because ATI cards have implemented a 24-bit floating point pipeline while NVIDIA cards implement a 32-bit pipeline. It is reasonable to expect the ATI card to outperform the NVIDIA card at the expense of some round-off errors. 32 vs. 24 bits on a color pixel is probably no big deal (although some color banding might arise), but when those results apply to vertex positions you could begin to see cracks in objects and shadows.
Note that the ATI card is still faster for Half-Life 2 in 16-bit mode, so it is probably a faster card overall for that game. There are so many ways to achieve similar looking effects on modern graphics cards that even as a graphics expert, I can't tell which card is actually faster.
I've been working with both the GeForceFX and Radeon9800 for some time and both are amazing cards. They have different capabilities under the hood, and can perform different operations at different speeds. Furthermore, under DirectX both cards are restricted to a common API but on OpenGL they have totally different capabilities. I don't think a consumer would go home unhappy with either card, except for the price.
-m
This should really be in the slashdot FAQ. It was settled way back in the day with 3DFX's demo comparing 30 and 60fps side by side.
And way back in the day, it was typical and expected for games on the Atari 800, Atari 2600, C64, etc., to run at 60fps (excepting faux 3D games, which ran at 5fps). Much of the angst about 60fps being excessive came from PC owners, who didn't even have the general capability to run at 60fps with VGA resolutions until 1995 or so, when we finally got away from having to push a 64K screen over an 8MHz bus. Once everyone got used to 60fps, then of course we started having the reverse angst, about games didn't run at 60+.
He he. Seriously, this game is what is going to finally make me upgrade my current vido card (ATI AIW-Pro-32) As you can tell, it has been a while since I have upgraded...
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I thought the article was about 3d cards. Besides, 'why does this belong on Slashdot?' posts are a long tradition.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Seriously, the way I run all games is with 6x FSAA and at least 2x Anisotropic filtering (quality), max texture resolution, max shaddow details, etc. If the game supports that, TruForm too.
I _am_ an ex-3dfx fanboy, and for me image quality is important. And since I do have the money to burn for that addiction, sure, I'll cheerfully buy a $400 to $500 card if that's what it takes to get my fix of great looking graphics.
And yes, I _am_ a serious gamer. I clock at least 40 hours of gaming per week, and that's on a slow week.
[RANT]
I really can't understand people who turn off all eye candy, to get a "boost" from 300 fps to 310 fps. I mean, really, no monitor can even display 300 frames per second, so what's the point? Even if you had your refresh rate at 100 Hz (which most el-cheapo CRTs or any expensive LCDs can't even do), that would still mean displaying 1 frame out of 3. You're still only actually seeing 100 fps, not 300 fps. So what's the point in ruining image quality for _zero_ reward?
[/RANT]
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Generally speaking, what you said is true, however there will be certain instances where your min fps is constant through varying average scores. Yes, I am nitpicking :)
Praying for the end of your wide-awake nightmare.
I like it when there is more than one company offering similar services.. They have to work hard to get your business, or you'll just go to the "other guy".
whoever is ahead in this race will change over time, but the 3d cards keep getting better and better. Even the low end cards are capable of 3d decent game playing now.
Notice that windows got more stable, when linux started being more of a threat.
But its from ATI so what do you expect?
If you use DX8 then Nvidia beats ATI
What I want to see is how HL2 works on really low level hardware.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
I noticed in the interview it mentioned that Valve were comtemplating bundling HL2 with a graphics card. Now, I
might just be being cynical but what if nVidia had already
turned down this idea, but ATi hadn't. Whose card would you want to look good if you were Valve?
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
There's a good reason why the ATI cards were so much faster than the nVidia: Half-Life 2 is optimized for the Radeon 9800.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It's quite amazing to me that nVidia has managed to slip so fast and so far down.
Yes, their graphics card performance has slipped a tad in the past year or so.
However, I can just about guarantee you that it's because the internal focus at nVidia has switched to becoming a leader in the Opteron/Athlon64/Hyper Transport chipset market. nVidia has bet the farm on becoming the traffic cop at the intersection of all the multimedia traffic that passes through your Taiwan-manufactured Opteron/Athlon64/Hyper Transport motherboard.
It's a HUGE gamble, and there's absolutely no guarantee that they won't stumble badly and go belly up.
On the other hand: Nothing ventured, nothing gained...
I'll buy my new graphic card when Duke nukem forever is done... Keep saying this and save money !
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Windows is more stable? Really? Wasn't it just the other day that ANOTHER security hole was found in the Windows OS? :->
:-))
:-))
But seriously though, with the competition, we the public is the winner since these companies need to struggle to offer the best bang for the buck. (This is of course that ATI and Nvidia continue to hate each other.
Lets see, we have graphics, sound, and to a point touch, all we need on our PCs is something to simulate smell. (Gotta have that gunpowdery smell after you show the wrong end of your boomstick to your buddy playing Doom 3.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
I was trying to decide on what card to buy recently. I read all the reviews, shopped for the best prices, and finally just found one that suited my budget. A GeForce FX5600 128MB RAM card from MSI. Why did I end up picking it you ask? It was only $157 but came with Ghost Recon, Morrowind, a few other games, a whole bunch of software including WinDVD, and a bunch of different adapters, cords, output and input options, etc. So I'm happy. I may not be able to crank all the 'special' video features to the max on HL2, but who cares?! I only really use Windows to game on anyways, and as long as the card was so cheap, had so many 'extras' with it, and can get decent support in Linux, I'll be happy. No, it's not the perfect solution, but all this video card posturing is lame anyways. HL2 is rumored to be capable of running just fine on a computer half as powerful as what was benchmarked in this report, so there's no need to have the eye-candy cranked up ALL the way - just enough to make the game fun.
(mind you, there's just been a new driver release from ATI, and I haven't installed that one yet)
I've got a 9700 Pro, and the ATI drivers have given me *a lot* of grief as a developer. There are many times when they are so blatantly non-compliant with the OpenGL standards, it's not funny.
For example, the driver claims to support OpenGL 1.3. With 1.3, ARB_multitexture has been promoted into the core, so they driver _should_ export glActiveTexture & friends without the ARB suffix. Well guess what? It doesn't. You have to use the *ARB versions of the functions.
I guess that a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that ATI is not as long in the Linux driver business as NVidia, and overall, things have in fact gotten better over time. But you should expect a bumpy ride.
So, anyone? I'm not trying to troll, I'm trying to get people's REAL experiences.
Vote for global prefs bug
Sucks when I have to spend more on the video card than the CPU just to play a game.
-i am n00b.
"SEATTLE -- Greetings from ATI's "Shader Days" event"
;)
Somehow I guessed ATI was going to win the benchmarks there...
Technology and FPS aside, Nvidia's support for Linux shines in comparison to ATI's offer. I'd really hate it if they follow 3dfx's path.
The Raven
I still hope ATI wins in the end, though. I like their technology quite a bit better than nVidia's....
The open source ATI drivers, both in XFree86 and other libraries, are written with technical specs and support from ATI.
.. nVidia does no such thing..
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
Results show the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro drawing around 60 FPS while the nVidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra only draws around 30
Maybe im missing something, and i dont know much about graphics in games but why is such a high frame-rate needed? or is that a field rate? film runs at 24fps (non-interlaced) and tv at 25 or 30 depending (50 or 60 interlaced fields per second). Why not pump the extra power into more polygons or better quality or something? You could even do fake motion blur...
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
_All_ this shows is that an unreleased beta of an upcoming game runs faster on one brand then another.
Add to this hints of a possible bundling deal, and I'll wait for the release version thanks.
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I mean, really, 3 times faster than the best nVidia card all of a sudden? I'm sorry, but no. If the Radeon was 3 times faster in every game, then sure, that would be fine, but for this particular game only? Common sense says "duh" .. I dont think ill be going near ATI anytime soon, and after those last nVidia scandal I dunno who to buy .. Both these companies are slime balls as far as im concerned.
If you read the article, you would have noticed the bit where they said they had to spend FIVE TIMES as long optimizing for the Nvidia cards.
And it still sucks.
Five times the effort, a drop to a hybrid low-precision mode, and Nvidia's still in the hole on DX9.
It's early, so I'm feeding the trolls. Don't get me wrong-- I loved my last three nvidia cards. But my most recent upgrade was ATI. I have no love for either side. Whoever gets the performance for a decent price wins. I'll buy a K-Mart brand video card if it wins the tests for the games I want to play.
Don't forget the lack of motion blur, and the fact that for a PC game, the framerate is an average, not a constant. You need your minimum to stay at a playable level, too.
Matrox! Matrox! Matrox!
... What?? It could happen!
Go Matrox!
[o]_O
I can actually feel/see my monitor flickering when it's at 60Hz. I guess this must be some indication that my eye is capable of registering at least 60 frames per second.
"If you use DX8 then Nvidia beats ATI"
Often true -- the FX cards are decent DX8.1 cards -- but totally worthless. I mean, who's going to buy a DX9 card just to run DX8 games?
Geforce FX DX9 support is slow, and shader benchmarks have been showing this for a long time. The fans have been saying 'oh, but they're synthetic benchmarks so they don't matter'... well, now we have a real DX9 game and it's running just as badly as the synthetic shader benchmarks run. The odd thing is that anyone is actually surprised at this.
Let me vent my frustrations with Valve and why I might not be buying HL2 after all.
Just yesterday, I saw a PR blurb from MS extolling HL2 as a reason why everyone should be using MS Windows: DX9.
I have increasingly become uncomfortable with Valve and the lack of concern they have about locking their product to a particular platform--and a monopolistic platform no less.
We could get into arguments for the rest of our lives about whether or not OpenGL or DX is a better game development platform. It would largely be irrelevant, though, given the fact that many of the most sophisticated games are being produced using standard libraries and non-MS platforms.
I'm getting sick of the vendor lock-in in the gaming industry, and I'm especially sick of it with MS. Valve hasn't really demonstrated an interest in anything but protecting their bottom line, and I'm infuriated.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but every day I get closer and closer to only playing games on consoles. Yes, then there would be vendor lock-in, but at least it's a lock-in I'm more comfortable with. I really don't enjoy console games as much, but what the fuck is someone to do?
I know this sounds like a troll. I don't mean it to be. I'm just aggravated by the gaming industry, and I'm increasingly perceiving Valve to be something that's not exactly consumer-friendly. I loved HL, but I don't see an effort by Valve to reach out to people such as myself, and feel alienated by them. Increasingly I have no problem giving my business elsewhere (e.g., Id, Bioware).
Well I think all the *nix users can do likewise;
for linux dx=bad ogl=good
for the other 99% of people dx=good ogl=good
See my journal, I write things there
back when Voodoo was king, and stand alone 3d accelerators were common. While the Riva128 was ugly (especially in comparison to some of the other choices out there) it was fast. and it was fast at higher resolutions, the Voodoo 1 did 320x200. where the riva 128 would get comparable framerates at 800x600, not to mention the fact that it could do 32 bit. (at a huge performance decrease however) The Riva128 was a good 2D card to hook up to your Voodoo2 however.
About the only thing this is illustrating is that the performance problems with D3D are pretty severe now. DX couldn't correctly render fog or water in the original Half-Done(tm) engine, and going to OpenGL drivers would not only boost the frame rate by as much as 66%, but would also correctly render those effects.
Also, RTFA, Nvidia is a little shy about "optimized" drivers for benchmarking certain applications. They specifically requested that the optimized drivers not be used. No indication that ATI did the same.
I doubt there will be a Linux version of HL2 either, because this new 3D engine appears to only support DirectX.
That's a shame, because the world didn't end with the America's Army developers ported AA:O to Linux. As a matter of fact, it runs quite well, and it didn't take them 5 years to produce nothing but vaporware.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
While I am not excusing nVidia's poor scores or their snit over 3DMark03, the reason D3 has two codepaths is because Carmack is very interested in using features only the nVidia cards have. He wants to use the procedural shading and lighting that nVidia's cg language provides.
nVidia chose to implement this in hardware and it gives them performance well beyond what anyone else can provide for procedural shading.
That's the good part.
The bad part is that while doing so, nVidia shorted the more traditional multi-texturing and shading systems that DX9 provides. These systems are less memory-bandwidth efficient although much easier to use.
As long as games continue to use the traditional methods nVidia's current hardware will have a large disadvantage versus ATI. And the kicker is that developers may never switch. Part of the reason is that developers are somewhat set in their ways. A larger part of the reason is that these traditional methods are what every other platform of note (meaning consoles, including even Xbox) use. So you can either make your game work well on nVidia's cards or instead make it work well on ATI's cards and every other platform out there.
As a developer, which are you going to do?
nVidia took a chance and tried to provide new levels of performance by changing the whole way graphics are programmed. A noble effort, but it hasn't worked and as such buying an nVidia card doesn't make sense to people whose primary goal is to run virtually all current and all past games as fast as possible.
im using that now, plays q3a just fine. its a low res (a laptop) but the frame rate is fast enough that i dont think about it.blender has minor rendering problems but still workable.
With a GeForce4 4200, you should be pretty well covered for all of today's games. I'd suggest that you keep your money and wait until the games you want to play come out. $150 then will buy something even better (or at least cheaper), and reviews will be on actual products, not over-hyped marketing presentations.
Here's a bittorrent link to the huge 25min in game movie
It's much cheaper, and beats the GeForce FX 5900 anyways
Half Life 2 graphics... eh... so so.
If you compare image quality with Baldur's Gate 2, or even the original Myst, you'll notice major artifacts such as sharp edges on objects, etc. Also, sometimes I see jagged edges on things where in Baldur's Gate you only see the jaggy edges on your characters and monsters.
It's really a step backwards.
Depends on the video input. Most new consoles, I believe, calculate a different frame for each interlaced pass, so the effective framerate is 60 fps at a reduced resolution. I think TV cameras do this as well. Hollywood movies don't, since their source is 25 fps. (I've always wondered how they manage to look decent at such a low framerate that is different from TV's base framerate, it must be all the motion blur. I guess PAL would be better for movies.).
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
From an article on firingsquad:
This is NVIDIA's Official statement: "The Optimizations for Half-Life 2 shaders are in the 50 series of drivers which we made available to reviewers on Monday [Sept. 8, 2003]. Any Half-Life 2 comparison based on the 45 series driver are invalid. NVIDIA 50 series of drivers will be available well before the release of Half-Life 2".
While I, like everyone else don't like trading off quality for framerate blah blah blah. Who knows what ATI's quality is like? Maybe they optimized their DX9 drivers for the fastest possibly/crappy quality off the bat. I'm going to wait to get the reviews for the Det 50 drivers and get some reviews of what the quality looks like on each card before I'll be making any purchases.
I was actually all set to buy an nv 5600 ulta until this came out. Think I'm gonna wait for them to duke it out a little bit and get to the bottom of things before I decide...
Certainly, this is the most common misconception about framerate.
People saying such things must be thinking about cinema, which is 24 FPS anyway. They just fail to realize that a movie frame is very different from a 3D game frame. The movie frame captures 1/24 of a second while the game frame is instantaneous, it has no duration. So the movie frame contains a lot more information than this game frame and that's just why you don't need as many of them to show the same movement.
btw, i'd also like to see those people with their desktop set to 30Hz (if that was possible). As far as i'm concerned, using a decent screen res, even 60Hz is annoying to say the least.
is about the time when nvidia started losing to ATi. The 3DFX guys wanted eye candy and the the Ati guys wanted speed. Well, since when does gaming ever revolve around anything at its core besides FPS? Ati wins.
That is just plain wrong. You used to be able to notice the difference between 1600X1200 and 1024X768 easily. Now that AA is around, the difference has blurred somewhat.
I run all of my games at 1600X1200 if I can get at least decent performance. Everything scales for the screen, looking the same size as everything on 1024X768, only much smoother. Higher resolutions also will allow for higher amounts of detail, if care has been given in that direction. You've got more pixels to play with, so you could render 1,000 more leaves on that tree, or render more pock-marks into that wooden doorway.
The only reason why you would think that 1600X1200 makes everything small is because of the sore state of the desktop. This is getting fixed, As referenced here, with SVG. Now, we just have to have the window graphics and fonts done with SVG, and we would all be in high res heaven.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
Nah, nah, nah. That's all lies. The top nVidia execs came from the planet Monop in the galaxy Oly. Their high tech, snazzy spacecraft crashed on this planet one day because they were smoking too much grass and also, their VR UI was second rate to the one made by ATI Trans-Dimensional.
Since then, the nVidia people have been trying to get enough money together so they can rebuild or repair their ship and get the hell off this blighted ball of mud and water we call "Earth".
Or maybe I've been reading too much Illuminatus!
Furry cows moo and decompress.
All cutting edge games have lower than ideal fps when they are released. First off, 60 FPS is more than adequate for a pretty smooth gaming experience. Of course it'll drop and you'll get chug from time to time, but overall, it's not an insurmountable obstacle.
Name one major cutting-edge 3-D shooter that was released that you could run at high resolution over 60 FPS at the time of release. I have never seen it. Typically if you are running 40-60 fps you are doing fine for a release game and when the next gen hardware comes out you'll go back over 100 in the "ideal" range for the serious hardcore gaming competitor.
That resolution, however, is completely adequate by any measure. You'd be surprised how many people still compete at 800x600 or so.
Finally, keep this in mind: most serious gamers who are so concerned with fps that 60 is not adequate, also turn all the extras down or off in their graphics setups. I'm willing to bet they didn't do that in the benchmark test. you can often double your fps by sacrificing unnecessary detail.
Two halves, shouldn't they have named it full life?:)
There are audiophiles, and then there are people who really can hear the difference. I'm talking about people who do extensive ABX blind testing, never accept information or opinions not backed up with scientifically-acquired evidence, and who, in general, really know their stuff when it comes to audio compression (being ones who are actually coding these encoders).
I mean, seriously, I'd call these guys audiophiles, but the word has already been defiled.
Evil, evil, evil.
I really hope that Gabe Newell is being honest about the fact that HL2 contains no ATI optimisations, as suspicious as it seems. Although the fact that The Carmack did say that the ARB OGL path in Doom3 runs better on the R3xx (and looks better) than on NV3xx, and that nVidia only gets the lead on the NV optimised code path, does seem to support what Valve claim to have demonstrated with the HL2 benchmarks. Different API but still using next-gen features. If that's the case that really would be a lesson to all graphics hardware makers to not depend on getting in bed with games developers so that games are optimized for particular GPUs to achieve maximum performance. The whole fucking point of graphics APIs like D3D and OGL is that developers can write one code path and it'll work well on all hardware for which there is a driver for that API - the hardware makers should be optimizing the hardware to accelerate these APIs period, not specific apps. Developers certainly shouldn't encourage hardware makers by agreeing to got to the effort of writing code optimised for specific GPUs. Bundling games with graphics cards is one thing, but coding them to work better with different cards goes to defeat the object of having a common graphics API. Let's not go back to the OGL mini driver days of Quake - one for nVidia, one for 3dfx, another for Rendition etc. End of Rant.
Over the last 24 hours, there has been quite a bit of controversy over comments made by Gabe Newell of Valve at ATIs Shader Day.
During the entire development of Half Life 2, NVIDIA has had close technical contact with Valve regarding the game. However, Valve has not made us aware of the issues Gabe discussed.
We're confused as to why Valve chose to use Release. 45 (Rel. 45) - because up to two weeks prior to the Shader Day we had been working closely with Valve to ensure that Release 50 (Rel. 50) provides the best experience possible on NVIDIA hardware.
Regarding the Half Life2 performance numbers that were published on the web, we believe these performance numbers are invalid because they do not use our Rel. 50 drivers. Engineering efforts on our Rel. 45 drivers stopped months ago in anticipation of Rel. 50. NVIDIA's optimizations for Half Life 2 and other new games are included in our Rel.50 drivers - which reviewers currently have a beta version of today. Rel. 50 is the best driver we've ever built - it includes significant optimizations for the highly-programmable GeForce FX architecture and includes feature and performance benefits for over 100 million NVIDIA GPU customers.
Pending detailed information from Valve, we are only aware one bug with Rel. 50 and the version of Half Life 2 that we currently have - this is the fog issue that Gabe refered to in his presentation. It is not a cheat or an over optimization. Our current drop of Half Life 2 is more than 2 weeks old. NVIDIA's Rel. 50 driver will be public before the game is available. Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers.
Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit. Sometimes this involves converting 32-bit floating point precision shader operations into 16-bit floating point precision shaders in order to obtain the performance benefit of this mode with no image quality degradation. Our goal is to provide our consumers the best experience possible, and that means games must both look and run great.
The optimal code path for ATI and NVIDIA GPUs is different - so trying to test them with the same code path will always disadvantage one or the other. The default settings for each game have been chosen by both the developers and NVIDIA in order to produce the best results for our consumers.
In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2.
We are committed to working with Gabe to fully understand his concerns and with Valve to ensure that 100+ million NVIDIA consumers get the best possible experience with Half Life 2 on NVIDIA hardware.
You are referring to the refresh rate of the monitor (The number of times the image that has already been sent to the video card memory is refreshed on the monitor itself.) This is a completely different issue than frames per second, which is limited by the processing power of the computer. A game running at 5FPS(Frames per second) will still show on the monitor at ~70Hz (what the parent posters ignorantly refer to as frames per second)
Really consoles should be discounted because the resolution sucks, even at the PAL 625/312 lines. HDTV should mean that we have a need for better console to explot the resolution. After all most people have bigger TVs than monitors, but the monitor is capable of working at far higher quality levels than the TV.
Actually Holywood goes at 24fps. However modern telecine doesn't give a damn because they stretch the duration of frames using digital processing.
See my journal, I write things there
"hardcore gamers can tell the difference between 60 and 100 fps."
Not.
What they CAN recognize is the difference between a 13" Fuzz-O-Matic monitor running a game on a $30 video card at 640 x 480 without antialiasing and anisotropic filtering =VS= a 20+" Trinitron running the same game on a bleeding edge Radeon with resolution + filtering + texture fluff at max.
People have bought into this "I can see 100 fps!" nonsense for so long and convinced themselves it's true that it's become an Urban Legend.
Neither you, nor I, nor Thresh, nor Lord Carmack, nor any other human being alive today can distinguish the difference between 60 and 100 fps.
--FourPak
Ok, Carmack made some extra paths for ATi, so what? ATi cards still ran fine with the default path ARB. Also, notice how ATi uses the ARB2 path, WHICH THE FX'S CAN ALSO USE BUT: "The NV30 runs the ARB2 path MUCH slower than the NV30 path." Because ATi has MUCH BETTER support for default paths, no matter how you look at it. Stop trying to twist everything so nvidia's cards don't look as shitty as they really are.