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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.
What a terrible article. It didn't even say what resolution all that was happening at.
Caffeine Good
Also, the Planet Half-Life Screenshot Gallery, a page with a huge number of interviews with Valve staff and previews of the game, and Videos. The huge one is awesome.
September 30th! I can't wait!
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Actually, if you bother to read the god damn article, you'll find that your 4600 (and my NV28 4800) beat the NV30 cards when the DX9 gubbins is turned off. Given that Valve are saying that it'll run on a DX6 or later card, it looks like this'll be a viable option for us poor bastards with 6 month old hardware.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them
Nothing going for them? Uh... do you know anything about nVidia's history?
nVidia was formed from disgruntled SGI employees. You know, the same SGI that created OpenGL and pioneered 3D graphics on computers? Yeah, that one. Why were they disgruntled? Because they had gone to the powers that be at SGI and said "you know, we could make a buttload of money off our technology -- we can make cards that do a large subset of the OpenGL calls and sell it to the PC market for cheap!" SGI management was all about profit margin though, and there's a lot more margin (although not as much profit) in selling a few cards for $50-100k than there is in selling hundreds of thousands or millions of cards for $150-450.
So a bunch of the top SGI graphics engineers left and went off to make their own company. The first few cards released by nVidia were actually OEM'd cards from another company. IIRC, the TNT was the first silicon and code from the ex-SGI engineers, and it was not "butt ugly with a handful of problems" by any means. There were initial problems with running 3Dfx only games (as in, it couldn't...), but Quake and OpenGL remedied that issue. The GeForce completely blew away 3Dfx and they never recovered.
Oh yeah... that little bit about them being ex-SGI engineers? Well, it came back to bite them. SGI sued the hell out of nVidia and it wound up being settled out of court. SGI retains options on advanced features in the silicon and drivers. One of the many reasons that the drivers can't be open sourced.
It seems that nVidia is now suffering from the same problem that plagues a lot of hot tech companies -- many of the primaries have made millions of dollars and decided they don't have the need/desire to work there anymore. So they retire, cash in their stock options, and then go pursue other interests, which robs the company of not only its top engineers but also its visionaries and leaders. The last couple generations of cards from nVidia appear to be due to this. They may come back still, and they're still better off than 3Dfx was, but they've certainly fallen from the lofty heights they used to occupy.
Maybe because HL2 is a DX-only game?
And, yes, OpenGL is inferior to DX at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 fixes most of the issues (particularly in the shader department), but it's far less mature than DX9 is.
And while DX isn't immune to vendor-specific code (see the discussion by Gabe Newell on this and NV3X in HL2, or the shader issues that occurred in DX8), MS is making efforts to reduce or eliminate those occurances. I suspect we'll see some pop up as DX9 becomes more mature, but they'll be resolved in DX10 just as the DX8 issues were resolved in DX9.
I'm not a MS fanboy, but the reality is that you can get a hell of a lot more support if you develop for DX than for OpenGL. That matters to a lot of developers. The downside is that you inherently limit your platform choices... but the reality is that there's 3.5 gaming platforms out there right now -- PC/Xbox (1.5), PS2, and GameCube. Porting anything between them is a virtual rewrite of the graphics engine anyway, so portability isn't a huge concern. The Mac and Linux markets are essentially non-existant.
OpenGL is ahead of DX and always will be. You get faster access to new features through vendor extensions and often better access to them.
You may be able to access more advanced features, but that also ties you down to writing specific code for each card you want to support. That's a freaking nightmare. API's are supposed to help you avoid doing that. As I said, both OpenGL and DX have had issues regarding this, but OpenGL's issues are far more prevelant and pervasive than DX's are at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 will fix a good bit of this, but it's not out yet (no.. it's not... all the pieces are in place but it hasn't been ratified yet).
or instance Carmack has talked about how he is better able to access some of the advanced shader features on Nvidia cards through the OpenGL exposed elements than through MS's DX9 interface which was coauthored with ATI
He's also commented on how miserably slow the nVidia cards are with the higher shader functions, even after dropping the precision back to 12 or 16-bit (compared to 32-bit in DX9, which ATI supports fully).
Hell, read the TechReport's discussion on HL2 and nVidia -- spending 5x more time optimizing the NV3X codepath than the generic DX9 codepath and still not even reaching the generic's performance is not a good way to spend your time. If I was a game developer (I'm not) I sure as hell wouldn't do that for most cards. The only reason Valve or id did so for nVidia is because they are such a huge market segment. Do you think they'll be looking at any optimizations for S3 or Matrox? Doubt it.
Until ATI stops writing crappy drivers and prematurly killing still sold hardware I won't be supporting them.
Same. Which is why my next card is probably going to be ATI -- they've ceased doing either of the above. I'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them, but their drivers and support have been very good for the past couple years. Which also happens to coincide with them firing their entire driver team. Which also occurred at the same time as the utter lack of driver support you reference. The new team seems much better about actually doing their jobs.