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.
Sure, they are compiling Direct X 9 for Linux as I'm writing these lines.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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
How is objectivity of this study any different from, say, a study by Microsoft promoting Windows?
What's this Submit thingy do?
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."
Is it just me, or is ATI pulling a real turnaround? They used to be the underdog for so long -- their drivers weren't the greatest, their marketshare was second-fiddle, and they initially missed out on the Xbox contract. I never thought I'd see the day where nVidia, which is practically the industry standard for gaming, might be challenged on such a thing as actual performance.
;-)
Oh well, at least communication between hardware and game developers has improved to the point that I won't need to specify to the game whether I have a Hercules, Tandy, or Trident chipset...
The coolest voice ever.
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
What a terrible article. It didn't even say what resolution all that was happening at.
Caffeine Good
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.
I wouldn't value these benchmarks too much, given they're from a game that hasn't yet gone gold. Features could be dropped from the graphics engine that will affect the way each card deals with the graphics.
... you insensitive clod!
Seriously though, are they allowing for people with older cards? (UT 2003 ran fine on my Voodoo3 and still looked pretty darn good, even w/o transparency, anti-aliasing, or any of the other modern GFX buzzwords)
All this boils down to show that nVidia are still strugling with full DX9 support on their chips. It is quiet probable that if the game was based on DX8 instead of 60/30 we had 80/80.
ATI are still ahead in the implementation of DX9 features.
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
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.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
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!
It's all very nice seeing how the latest and greatest cards perform but how about some test results for older cards.
I prefer to save my pennies and upgrade my graphics card to the one just behind the current generation.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
...such a test.... the results are here third graph:
1. No sig. 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
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.
I want a good framerate and I dont have a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro ... Did they realize that that card was $750 over here? I got two 10k hardrive, a raid card and 512 meg of ram for that price !
on the fastest cards on the market ?
I guess my GeForce4 ti4600, which is just over 1 years old, will only get 30fps or so ! Which means I'll be a sitting duck in netgames.
If these are indeeed optimized benchmarks, I doubt we'll see HL2 on the market soon. The'yll have to wait at least untill the R9800 or U5900 become mainstream. (read : at console-level prices)
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The thing worng with these benchmarks is they only cover DirectX9. Any self respecting Half-Life player always keeps it in OpenGL mode, especially if it's in the land of NVidia. I can't think of a single game that lets me choose between DirectX and OpenGL where I have chosen OpenGL over the dx. Carmack likes opengl, and he knows more about it than anyone I know.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
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.
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.
No, they are not. There was an FAQ put out a while ago with the answers officially from Valve, and they were asked if a Linux port would be coming out. They said no, and there were no plans to do it at all. However, if Transgaming aren't all over this game the moment it comes out, I'll be very surprised.
Toms Hardware
FiringSquad
Tech Report
Gamers Depot
Beyond 3d
I often hear people say "after 30 fps you can't tell the difference", or something to that effect. That might be true if you were playing back the frames evenly spaced. However, your monitor runs at a fixed 60 Hz framerate (or 70 or 80, but let's just say 60), so a "fps" of 50 will have you showing 5 frames, showing the last frame again, and then showing 5 more, which can produce a noticable stutter even though the "fps" is 50. So that is one reason why you might want a "fps" of at least 60 (or 70, or 80). Also, the really meaningful value is "minimum fps", because that is what you're going to get when you're fighting the boss and all these guys are coming at you and all these things are happening at once. Usually, a higher average fps (say, 120) indicates that the minimum fps will also be higher. So, a high fps score can still be good even if your monitor can't display 120 frames every second.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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
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.
a "screenshot" should capture what is on the "screen" and save that to an image file. That's what a screenshot has been historically, and it's what people expect from similarly named features. What you're talking about would be an entirely different feature. You're talking about "Render this scene to a file", in which case you might want to increase the resolution or quality settings. What would be a more valuable feature in certain games would be something like "Render this entire map to a file." The thought being of course that you would create an image that showed the entire map while the screen would only show a portion. What was done in this case is so clearly a dodge. They know that hardware sites often measure image quality of cards by taking screen captures and comparing the images and they were just trying to hide their warts.
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.
Not true
synthetic benchmarks have been showing that the geforce FX has poor directX 9 performance
just everyone dismissed them because they were synthetic benchmarks
FYI
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
I was trying to decide on what card to buy recently. I read all the reviews, shopped for the best prices, and finally just found one that suited my budget. A GeForce FX5600 128MB RAM card from MSI. Why did I end up picking it you ask? It was only $157 but came with Ghost Recon, Morrowind, a few other games, a whole bunch of software including WinDVD, and a bunch of different adapters, cords, output and input options, etc. So I'm happy. I may not be able to crank all the 'special' video features to the max on HL2, but who cares?! I only really use Windows to game on anyways, and as long as the card was so cheap, had so many 'extras' with it, and can get decent support in Linux, I'll be happy. No, it's not the perfect solution, but all this video card posturing is lame anyways. HL2 is rumored to be capable of running just fine on a computer half as powerful as what was benchmarked in this report, so there's no need to have the eye-candy cranked up ALL the way - just enough to make the game fun.
(mind you, there's just been a new driver release from ATI, and I haven't installed that one yet)
I've got a 9700 Pro, and the ATI drivers have given me *a lot* of grief as a developer. There are many times when they are so blatantly non-compliant with the OpenGL standards, it's not funny.
For example, the driver claims to support OpenGL 1.3. With 1.3, ARB_multitexture has been promoted into the core, so they driver _should_ export glActiveTexture & friends without the ARB suffix. Well guess what? It doesn't. You have to use the *ARB versions of the functions.
I guess that a lot of this can be attributed to the fact that ATI is not as long in the Linux driver business as NVidia, and overall, things have in fact gotten better over time. But you should expect a bumpy ride.
Technology and FPS aside, Nvidia's support for Linux shines in comparison to ATI's offer. I'd really hate it if they follow 3dfx's path.
The Raven
well, because film has that motion blur inherent in the media, so you can have the lower framerate and your eyes won't notice. Meanwhile a computer screen has no blur, its pretty much a slideshow on crack. Therefore human eyes on a "digital" display media need 60fps to see smooth continuous motion. Or at least that's how it was explained to me years ago when people were complaining why does it matter if this card can do 100FPS in quake 2 and this other can do 120 when 60 is all you can see.
Viva La Revolucion! Buy a Mac!
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.
Matrox! Matrox! Matrox!
... What?? It could happen!
Go Matrox!
[o]_O
back when Voodoo was king, and stand alone 3d accelerators were common. While the Riva128 was ugly (especially in comparison to some of the other choices out there) it was fast. and it was fast at higher resolutions, the Voodoo 1 did 320x200. where the riva 128 would get comparable framerates at 800x600, not to mention the fact that it could do 32 bit. (at a huge performance decrease however) The Riva128 was a good 2D card to hook up to your Voodoo2 however.
About the only thing this is illustrating is that the performance problems with D3D are pretty severe now. DX couldn't correctly render fog or water in the original Half-Done(tm) engine, and going to OpenGL drivers would not only boost the frame rate by as much as 66%, but would also correctly render those effects.
Also, RTFA, Nvidia is a little shy about "optimized" drivers for benchmarking certain applications. They specifically requested that the optimized drivers not be used. No indication that ATI did the same.
I doubt there will be a Linux version of HL2 either, because this new 3D engine appears to only support DirectX.
That's a shame, because the world didn't end with the America's Army developers ported AA:O to Linux. As a matter of fact, it runs quite well, and it didn't take them 5 years to produce nothing but vaporware.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
From an article on firingsquad:
This is NVIDIA's Official statement: "The Optimizations for Half-Life 2 shaders are in the 50 series of drivers which we made available to reviewers on Monday [Sept. 8, 2003]. Any Half-Life 2 comparison based on the 45 series driver are invalid. NVIDIA 50 series of drivers will be available well before the release of Half-Life 2".
While I, like everyone else don't like trading off quality for framerate blah blah blah. Who knows what ATI's quality is like? Maybe they optimized their DX9 drivers for the fastest possibly/crappy quality off the bat. I'm going to wait to get the reviews for the Det 50 drivers and get some reviews of what the quality looks like on each card before I'll be making any purchases.
I was actually all set to buy an nv 5600 ulta until this came out. Think I'm gonna wait for them to duke it out a little bit and get to the bottom of things before I decide...
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.
That is just plain wrong. You used to be able to notice the difference between 1600X1200 and 1024X768 easily. Now that AA is around, the difference has blurred somewhat.
I run all of my games at 1600X1200 if I can get at least decent performance. Everything scales for the screen, looking the same size as everything on 1024X768, only much smoother. Higher resolutions also will allow for higher amounts of detail, if care has been given in that direction. You've got more pixels to play with, so you could render 1,000 more leaves on that tree, or render more pock-marks into that wooden doorway.
The only reason why you would think that 1600X1200 makes everything small is because of the sore state of the desktop. This is getting fixed, As referenced here, with SVG. Now, we just have to have the window graphics and fonts done with SVG, and we would all be in high res heaven.
You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.
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.