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Initial Half-Life 2 Benchmarks Released

Posted by simoniker on from the who's-better-who's-best? dept.

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.

3 of 421 comments (clear)

  1. Benchmarking even shadier? by dmayle · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."

  2. Re:Yawn... by Glock27 · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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).

    Well, I was pleased to see the showing the GeForce 4 Ti4600 put up in those tests. I think those can be had fairly cheaply these days (I payed $249 several months ago).

    I'm running it in this Athlon 2600+ system (RH 9, fully accelerated NVIDIA drivers). I've been doing some OpenGL development lately, and it's been great on Linux! I have nothing but good things to say about NVIDIA's drivers and OpenGL implementation. Could anyone comment on the quality of ATI's OpenGL support with the 9800 Pro class cards under Linux? (I'd like to hear from the perspective of a developer, but gameplayers would be interesting too).

    On the other hand, I do know one way to get great (or at a minimum good) OpenGL drivers for the Radeon 9800 Pro - buy a PowerMac G5. :-) (Yes, I know you could use Windows also...but let's keep our perspective here.)

    --
    Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
    Score: -1 100% Flamebait
  3. ATI runs in 24-bit, NVIDIA in 32-bit by magic · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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