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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.
From the article : Valve's General Program Manager Gabe Newell gave the presentation at an analyst conference being held by ATI in Seattle. And while the circumstances may seem slightly suspect given the event and the Valve/ATI OEM deal, Newell was quick to dispel any such conflict of interest.
Believe it those who will, but I would certainly question the integrity of the test, and I won't buy an ATI card over nVidia over this just yet.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.