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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.
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
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
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
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.