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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.
How is objectivity of this study any different from, say, a study by Microsoft promoting Windows?
What's this Submit thingy do?
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.
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
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.
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 !
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.
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That is awful. I'd much rather driver authors spent their time actually improving the drivers, rather than coming up with ways of fooling people into thinking they are improved.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
So go on, spend your money on useless things, play Quake 3 at 300fps and marvel at how you see things before they happen. Fact is, you cannot see the difference between 60Hz and 120Hz.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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.
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.
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?" `":" #");}
Forget about ATI, I never thought I'd see the day when nVidia was the standard. Back in the old days of the 3D wars, 3DFX was fast, Rendition was pretty, and nVidia was just butt ugly with a handful of problems.
I always rooted for Rendition, but I suppose they died when Micron bought them.
If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them, and they managed to turn that around. I still hope ATI wins in the end, though. I like their technology quite a bit better than nVidia's....and you can't beat the 2d/3d quality with anything but a Matrox.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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.
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.
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.
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've got lots of friends who do exactly what you're talking about: buying top-of-the-line games and hardware then cranking their visual settings down to pong-esque mode just for faster gameplay.
Excuse me, but when I drop $300-500 on a video card I want my screen to fucking blow me away! I didn't pay for the new technology just to see it wasted. FPS are important, but getting your money's worth and enjoying what the artists put together for the game is far more interesting than simply looking to get a bigger number.
Speaking of, any word of OpenGL support?
Of course current ATI and nVidia cards--and truth be told the last couple of generations, too--have been total overkill in the performance department for everything except the very high end games. When you realize that those very high end games represent about 10-20% of the total PC game market, then you realize what a wash this all has become. Does it matter if you're dominating a small minority of the market, especially if you're doing it without regard to price?
Dude, it's called "trickle-down." Same thing happens at car-shows. The industry puts out "concept cars" that are truly revolutionary, cost a small (or large) fortune, and are bought by very few (if any.) Eventually, some of those innovations make their way down to consumer-level designs, where they have become refined and affordable. People are happy.
It's nearly the same with graphics cards. Sure, few can afford the $400+ cards, and they mean very little to the current generation of games, but eventually, the technology trickles-down into consumer-level cards, where they have become refined and affordable. People are happy. I'm pretty sure that whatever card you or anyone else has today, was probably at one time one of these "ridiculously unnecessary" cards.
Designing anything for "today" would be suicide. You have to anticipate (or help control) where the market is heading, and design for that. That's why games like Daikatana and DNF fail (or will fail.) They designed for something short-term and got left behind by the rest of the market. Daikatana shipped, but was not revolutionary enough. DNF keeps putting off the inevitable, but the result will probably be the same.
I'd be willing to bet money that you didn't run Half-Life at that resolution when it first came out ;)