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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.
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."
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!
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Forget about ATI, I never thought I'd see the day when nVidia was the standard. Back in the old days of the 3D wars, 3DFX was fast, Rendition was pretty, and nVidia was just butt ugly with a handful of problems.
I always rooted for Rendition, but I suppose they died when Micron bought them.
If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them, and they managed to turn that around. I still hope ATI wins in the end, though. I like their technology quite a bit better than nVidia's....and you can't beat the 2d/3d quality with anything but a Matrox.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
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.
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.
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.