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.
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.
From the article : Valve's General Program Manager Gabe Newell gave the presentation at an analyst conference being held by ATI in Seattle. And while the circumstances may seem slightly suspect given the event and the Valve/ATI OEM deal, Newell was quick to dispel any such conflict of interest.
Believe it those who will, but I would certainly question the integrity of the test, and I won't buy an ATI card over nVidia over this just yet.
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.
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
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.
Also, the Planet Half-Life Screenshot Gallery, a page with a huge number of interviews with Valve staff and previews of the game, and Videos. The huge one is awesome.
September 30th! I can't wait!
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
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.
It took me ages to realise that "FPS games" were "first-person shooter games" - owing to all the hardcore gamers posting on /., losing sleep over small video card performance enhancements I always thought it meant "frames per second games"...
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Actually, if you bother to read the god damn article, you'll find that your 4600 (and my NV28 4800) beat the NV30 cards when the DX9 gubbins is turned off. Given that Valve are saying that it'll run on a DX6 or later card, it looks like this'll be a viable option for us poor bastards with 6 month old hardware.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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
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
Audiophiles are idiots and musicians are often tone deaf.
Audiophiles can supposedly hear artifacts produced by gravity waves passing through solid-gold oxygen-free "ribbon" cables. Stop paying attention to their ramblings: it only encourages them.
Actually I think you made that one up. Every movie buff knows that film frames are double shuttered to play at 48fps. Films played with single shutter are noticeably flickery. True movie buffs also know that the director can't pan a shot too fast or he'll get stutter, so they'd be aware that the human eye sees rates in excess of 24 fps.
I claim shenanigans. I don't think anybody claimed that "the human eye can only see 24 fps". You just made it up because you didn't have an argument.
Maybe because HL2 is a DX-only game?
And, yes, OpenGL is inferior to DX at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 fixes most of the issues (particularly in the shader department), but it's far less mature than DX9 is.
And while DX isn't immune to vendor-specific code (see the discussion by Gabe Newell on this and NV3X in HL2, or the shader issues that occurred in DX8), MS is making efforts to reduce or eliminate those occurances. I suspect we'll see some pop up as DX9 becomes more mature, but they'll be resolved in DX10 just as the DX8 issues were resolved in DX9.
I'm not a MS fanboy, but the reality is that you can get a hell of a lot more support if you develop for DX than for OpenGL. That matters to a lot of developers. The downside is that you inherently limit your platform choices... but the reality is that there's 3.5 gaming platforms out there right now -- PC/Xbox (1.5), PS2, and GameCube. Porting anything between them is a virtual rewrite of the graphics engine anyway, so portability isn't a huge concern. The Mac and Linux markets are essentially non-existant.
OpenGL is ahead of DX and always will be. You get faster access to new features through vendor extensions and often better access to them.
You may be able to access more advanced features, but that also ties you down to writing specific code for each card you want to support. That's a freaking nightmare. API's are supposed to help you avoid doing that. As I said, both OpenGL and DX have had issues regarding this, but OpenGL's issues are far more prevelant and pervasive than DX's are at the moment. OpenGL 2.0 will fix a good bit of this, but it's not out yet (no.. it's not... all the pieces are in place but it hasn't been ratified yet).
or instance Carmack has talked about how he is better able to access some of the advanced shader features on Nvidia cards through the OpenGL exposed elements than through MS's DX9 interface which was coauthored with ATI
He's also commented on how miserably slow the nVidia cards are with the higher shader functions, even after dropping the precision back to 12 or 16-bit (compared to 32-bit in DX9, which ATI supports fully).
Hell, read the TechReport's discussion on HL2 and nVidia -- spending 5x more time optimizing the NV3X codepath than the generic DX9 codepath and still not even reaching the generic's performance is not a good way to spend your time. If I was a game developer (I'm not) I sure as hell wouldn't do that for most cards. The only reason Valve or id did so for nVidia is because they are such a huge market segment. Do you think they'll be looking at any optimizations for S3 or Matrox? Doubt it.
Until ATI stops writing crappy drivers and prematurly killing still sold hardware I won't be supporting them.
Same. Which is why my next card is probably going to be ATI -- they've ceased doing either of the above. I'd still like to see a unified driver architecture from them, but their drivers and support have been very good for the past couple years. Which also happens to coincide with them firing their entire driver team. Which also occurred at the same time as the utter lack of driver support you reference. The new team seems much better about actually doing their jobs.