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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.
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.
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."