Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Kind of like how NWN is DirectX compliant for Linux?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
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."
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
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
.plan files for proof.
Oh Good Lord, what kind of Trolling is that.
I'll note a few things here:
Firstly, NVidia has reigned supreme in the Direct X 8 and prior arena. Their GeForce cards are awesome.
But DX9 is all about pixel shaders. They are the future, and ATI realized that. They built their R300 core (Radeon 9600/9700) based on the DX9 spec, and it shows. The newest games, such as HL2, which rely heavily on DX9 extensions, run better on ATI hardware than NVidia's stuff because they have to use hacks to get DX9 extensions, such as pixel shaders, to work properly with the GeForce line. NVidia doesn't have it built into the hardware, and the gamers who have them will suffer because of it.
John Carmack has had to write special code in Doom 3 to compensate for the NV30 core that doesn't like DX9 as much as it should. Go read some of his
Look up your facts, and try to stay away from troll-like generalizing until you know what you're talking about.
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
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
Interesting Analogy...
;)
We all know who Microsoft favours between Intel and AMD. We also know who Microsoft favours between ATI and nVidia!! (and it just so happens that the ones MS doesnt favour are the ones that support linux and linux users the best)
and MS are also behind DX 9. I wouldn't be surprised if ATI have been given way more support from MS with DX 9 compatibility than nVidia have but that's purely just skepticism on my part.
The real issue at hand is NOT which card performs better, but which card is more compatible with Valve's coding techniques.
What's the bet that if they'd used a real API like OpenGL then nVidia would come out tops? Or perhaps if they'd used slightly different techniques the results would be different - which they've already half-proved with their 'mixed mode' code...except it appears they're not real familiar with nVidia cards since their 'optimisations' hardly benefitted the benchmarks at all.
Just because ATI cards appear to support DX 9 better (or, particularly, Valve's use of vertex/pixel shaders - which just happens to be one small part of DX 9), doesnt mean they are a better card. If one was to remove all vertex/pixel shader code from the game the results might be a tad closer to the mark.
I do agree that nVidia have some work to do to get HL2 up to speed but I would argue that this whole thing is SPECIFIC TO HL2 and ONLY HL2! Otherwise we'd have heard of this before now.
The coders at Valve can blame video drivers all they like but if no one else has had the problems they're having then its pretty obvious what the deal is. Not to point the finger directly, but my point is that until we hear the same results from more developers and from entirely different games/code then we can safely ignore this issue completely.
Also, Valve were quick to dismiss the new nVidia drivers over 'application-specific optimisations' issues. Let me ask you - what is the difference between Valve producing code that is optimised for a specific line of video card (not saying this is on purpose) or a video card manufacturer producing code that is optimised for the game? Its essentially the same thing. nVidia are doing what they can to provide their customers with value for money and leading performance, and to me that is far more commendable than a company who's support for Linux and Linux users is pitiful at best.
The interesting thing is how big an issue this is to many people (guess i'm included too) - all over just 1 game...and its all linked to just 1 feature (pixel shaders).
Take a look at history:
...
1) 3dfx is king of 3D
2) nVidia comes along with interesting products, 3dfx still king
3) nVidia improves (TNT, GeForce), 3dfx struggles, both run neck-and-neck
4) 32-bit becomes important, nVidia take the lead
5) 3dfx struggles, plays catch-up (Voodoo4, 5), yet becomes irrelevant
Then we have:
1) nVidia is king of 3D
2) ATI comes along with intersting products, nVidia still king
3) ATI improves (Rage, Radeon), nVidia struggles, both run neck-and-neck
4) DX9 becomes important, ATI takes the lead
5) nVidia struggles, plays catch-up (FX series), yet
It's not a hard cycle to visualize. A lot of other similarities are there, as well: "fan-boys", aggressive advertising, benchmark scandals, developers' opinions, etc. It's actually pretty cool for us, as we get great advancements in 3D.
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.
You hit the nail on the head. There's no motion blur-- the frames are drawn "crisp". So, in order to look as good as naturally motion-blurred film or TV, you need *at least* two frames for each TV frame to give your eyes and brain two things to blur between.
And I'd guess you'd need more than 2. So, if TV looks nice at 30fps, you probably need something like 60-120fps to look as smooth.
Not to mention that unlike TV with its never-changing 30fps framerate, the numbers you see for games are an average. At 60fps, you might see framerate drops to 15 or 20fps. And it's always at the worst moment-- it's when 15 guys have all their particle-effect weapons pointed right at you. The more crap that's in your view, the slower it goes. You want a nice, high average so your framerate floor is still playable.
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.
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.