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Half-Life 2, ATI, NVIDIA, and a Sack of Cash
Latent IT writes "If you're into games, and unless you've been living under a rock for the past few days, you've heard a bit of a rumble from Valve on the relative quality of ATI vs. NVIDIA cards. Starting with articles like this one (previously reported), Valve told the world that the ATI 9800 Pro was nearly three times faster in some cases than the formerly competitive NVIDIA offering, the 5900 Ultra. Curiously, this happened at an ATI sponsored event, "Shader Day". But the story hasn't stopped there. NVidia released this response, essentially claiming that their new drivers, that were available to Valve at the time of their press conference, would make for vast, legitimate performance improvements. An interview with Massive, the creators of the Aquamark 3d benchmark, seems to confirm this opinion - that the NV3x chipset wasn't designed around any certain API very well, and the drivers are critical in achieving good performance. Anandtech writes here about the restrictions Valve placed on what benchmarks could be run. However, the key to this whole story may be this: an article, which I haven't seen get much coverage in all this, seems to make everything a little clearer - Valve stated that their OEM bundling deal with ATI came from the fact that ATI's cards were so superior, and that they were "performance enthusiasts". However, if the Inquirer is to be believed, the bundling deal was a result of an outright auction, on what will probably be the most popular game of the year. Which year that might be, is another issue altogether. Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
I'm starting to wonder if HL2's numbers are going to be quite as good as HL1, considering the aggressive marketing, shady practices, tie-ins with the less-friendly-than-advertised Steam, and a lot of other publisher-related snafus. Sierra and Valve seem to be regarding Half-Life 2 as such a massive potential success that they can get away with pretty much any customer-abuse they want.
Weapons of Mass Analysis
Don't accuse Valve of any foul play. Even Carmack has said that unless you use Nvidia specific extensions for pixel shaders, the performance will not be very good, due to the FX series of cards using 32bit percision by default.
personally I could really care which card has better DX9 support then the other.....im just worried about their linux drivers and Nvidia has definantly got ATI beat.
The problem lies in the way the FX deals with Pixel Shader 2.0 instructions. AFAIK, the ATI card follows DirectX standards pretty well and the Microsoft DirectX compiler will produce code that the 9800 will process quickly. ATI's drivers can rearrange the pixel shader commands a little bit to improve performance.
The Geforce FX processes PS2.0 instructions in a whole different way. Using Microsoft's compiler produces slow code when using PS2.0. Nvidia still doesn't have a JIT compiler in their drivers to reorder the PS2.0 instructions for maximum performance. The Detonator 50 series drivers are supposed to fix this. How well it's fixed is still up in the air.
Let's face it, both vendors have top-end products that are screaming fast. They'll put up more polygons per second than anything that came before, and just about any game that's currently out there is going to look fantastic on either brand. Provided you run Windows...
Which I don't. So when it came time to upgrade my system (about 2 weeks ago), Nvidia won hands-down -- and it was because they are Linux friendly, not because some rigged benchmark somewhere said they are a few frames per second faster than the other guy. Nvidia has been providing quality Linux drivers for their products for a long time, and I hope they'll continue to do so.
I've been playing a lot of Neverwinter Nights on my 5900 and it looks beautiful. I'm planning to purchase more Linux games as soon as my budget permits. Yes, there are people out there running Linux who appreciate high-end graphics cards. Probably more than the marketing types think; after all, most hacker types I know are also hardcore gamers.
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I think it's infinitely easier to write and optimize a program around a specific hardware architecture than it is to try to write for everything as a whole, and thereby bringing the quality of your software down the LCA (Lowest common API).
Valve made a great game four or five years ago, and someone else made an even better game by modifying it. However resting on their laurels all these years and then coming out with a windows only game, selling themselves into a hardware vendor fight, and trying to tie the game into a subscription service has me really steamed. Chances are they won't have lightning in a bottle the second time around. As a matter of fact, I'm starting to think that Savage(www.s2games.com) might really be the next Half Life. It's a first time release from a small start up that supports Linux and Windows on the same retail Cd. They are also promising heavy support for modding the game and after just a few days of playing I'm completely hooked.
if Valve did ptimize HL2 for ATI
:P
then how come these programs also show Nvidia shader performance as pathetic
halo PC
tomb raider angel of darkness
shadermark
3dmark03
and why have the det 50 drivers which nvidia recomended that valve used been proven to reduce image quality by a substantial amount?
is ATI really rich enough to buy off all of these companies and also manage to sabotage Nvidias drivers and PR team?
Both ATI and nVidia are guilty of trying to stack things in their favor dishonestly. ATI making deals with Valve to get HL2 to work better on the ATI cards by design is just the most recent example, and while it might be a major example, both sides have done this before.
At the same time, both card makers are really putting out insane results that wouldn't have been thought of even a couple of years ago.
My decision in graphics cards is based on my past experience and driver support. In this area nVidia still winds hands down. If ATI wants to sell me a card, they're going to need to beef up their Linux driver support big time.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
nVidia is rewriting the ENTIRE shader engine with dynamic re-ordering for the 50 series drivers. I'm not sure you understand - this is NOT a trivial task. The shader problem has been that you either optimize for ATi's shaders, or you optimize for nVidia's. The 50 series drivers with the dynamic re-ordering is supposed to help alleviate this - the driver will optimize at run time what the developers may not have done at compile time.
The 50 series drivers were incomplete during HL2 development. The driver samples that nVidia was providing to Valve were milestone drivers - incomplete featurewise, but each completed feature was "complete" (written to specs and considered stable). The fact that fog was not rendering is likely not a speed hack, but an as-yet incomplete (as in not even started in that driver release) feature.
Trust is a hard thing to earn, and easy to lose. I'm withholding judgement until nVidia's promised 50 series drivers come out.
Inconceivable!
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games" I'll tell you what happened, a little thing called market growth. The more the market grows the more this stuff will happen, in maybe 1-2 years the games industry will become much like the movie/music industry. With games taking 3-5 years and 20-200 people to create only big studios will be able to foot the bill and suck up the costs if the game tanks. Not to mention ad costs. This will lead to higher quality titles, but less of them and they will be even more of the same crap (just like the movie industry today). In 2-5 years the games industry will surpase the movie industry in tearms of sales and revenue, because games cost 40-80/copy and movie just can't hang with that. When that happens expect this sort of stuff to happen daily.
Why? Well, one stated reason was a policy to test only with "publicly available hardware, and publicly available software". Laudable enough, considering that non-public drivers could have any number of bugs or "optimisations" that could render the game incorrectly and thus misrepresent its performance.
Indeed, Valve referred to an issue where fog was completely left out of an entire level, and though they didn't point any fingers, it was later revealed that yes, the beta Det 50s were the culprit.
For further info, you should read this report on the performance of the beta Release 50 Detonators. Summary: not much difference - at least for DX8-level games. DX9 is where the focus supposedly was, and there is a 25% gain in the PS2.0 test in 3DMark03, which is something.
However, who knows if it'll translate to a 25% gain in HalfLife 2 - probably not, in itself. And given recent 3DMark/nVidia events, even that much is uncertain, until the drivers are released for public examination. In any case, it's a long way short of the 100% gain needed for the 5900 Ultra to just draw even with the 9800 Pro.
nVidia apparently have a strong lead in Doom 3 scores, though (admittedly with the partial-precision NV3X-specific code path), so they will no doubt be hoping that Doom 3 outsells HalfLife 2... Myself, I have a 9600 Pro in my sights, just in time for the HL2 release :-)
BTW, regarding the release delay? According to Gabe Newell, "First I've heard of it". So there you are. Only 16 days to go...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Nice troll.
.plan and even posted about it here in /.:
1 216 n c&id=16154
;) //K
[disclaimer, I couldn't care less which one sucks less ati or nvidia, I personally like matrox as I like "solid state" cards with dual head and have no need for 3d stuff]
You, hypocrite bastard, forgot to mention that nv3x supports 16 *and* 32 bit floating point, while ati only supports 24, of course when you do things at 32bit precision, nv3x is slower than ati at 24bit, and that when you do it at 16 it's faster, but the quality isn't that good.
God Carmack has written more than enough about this in his
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=65617&cid=605
and
http://finger.planetquake.com/plan.asp?userid=joh
Now, what *I* want is the video card manufacturers(and hardware manufacturers in general) to stop behaving like 3 year olds and fucking document their products and release open source drivers, that would get ride of most of this bull shit that is just driven by marketoids, wastes everyones time and contributes nothing to improve the technology that is what really matters.
And maybe then we could get some decent 3D system under Plan9 that kicked everyone else's ass, just like draw* did for 2d
* Not related in any way to DirctDraw, you ignorant idiot.
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?"
Whatever happened to the good ole days when people didn't believe everything they heard or read?
I'm just skeptical of an article that says we "heard from a friend of a friend." It's all too speculative, with little evidence of any real wrongdoing. Newel expressed concerns about the drivers that Nvidia was offering. He also said it took three times as long to write the codepath for NVIDIA, implying that they had to account for a lot more problems. If you want to speculate, look at the slides from "shader day."
To qoute: "During the development of that benchmark demo Valve found a lot of issues in current graphic card drivers of unnamed manufacturers:
Camera path-specific occlusion culling
Visual quality tradeoffs e.g. lowered filtering quality, disabling fog
Screen-grab specific image rendering
Lower rendering precision
Algorithmic detection and replacement
Scene-specific handling of z writes
Benchmark-specific drivers that never ship
App-specific and version specific optimizations that are very fragile"
And we know that several of these have been explicitly tied to NVIDIA.
ATI was ALMOST the first to market with a DirectX8.0 card, the ATI Radeon, which supported programmable pixel and vertex shaders when all nVidia had was the Geforce2 GTS. Unfortunately, Microsoft dropped support for the version of the DirectX8.0 API ATI was using, thus dooming the Radeon to be a DirectX7 card and making the Geforce3 the first DirectX8.0 card to market.
ATI WAS the first to market with a DirectX8.1 solution, in the Radeon 8500. The Radeon 8500's Pixel Shader v1.4 was more advanced than any nVidia product until the release of the Geforce FX. The Geforce4 Ti only supported PS1.3, which is significantly less advanced.
ATI WAS the first to market with a DirectX9.0 solution, the Radeon 9700 Pro. nVidia still lags behind, with the Geforce FX offering well below average shader performance even when using their reduced accuracy shader programs.
The best proof of the R300+ platform's superiority is that nVidia's own, in-house developed DirectX9.0 demos run faster and look better on Radeon hardware than on the Geforce FX. If that isn't a damning indictment of the poor quality of the NV30 architecture, I don't know what is.
This is no great mystery and no surprise in the graphics community, this is the bloody break everyone has been waiting for! The FX's shortcomings have been known for quite some time and have been analysized/discussed to death within the quiet confines of such places as www.beyond3D.com and www.nvnews.net, in fact the latter site's mods/admins are the ones who are shutting up the remaining nVidiots who seem to still think this is some big conspiracy.
;) )
It IS a conspiracy, but entirely of nVidia's own doing and creation...their hardware simply can't do DX9 well as it was never designed to. There's many reasons for this, but it mainly comes down to nVidia tried to redefine the standards of the graphics industry and failed and now are paying the consequences for their hubris.
The only thing surprising here is the size of Gabe Newell's balls to come out and directly address this in such a fashion, and I truly respect and admire him for it. He HAD to, the game is going to come out and if he didn't customers would be blaiming him and Valve for FX's shortcomings!
I'm terribly disapointed in the coverage I've seen of this on slashdot, I really thought you folks would be able to appreciate the subtle (and not so subtle) aspects of a giant company that has been resting on it's laurels and using PR fud to make up for it's hardware's shortcomings...it's just now there is really a game coming out that will highlight this and the rest of the world seems to be noticing it.
There is excellent coverage of this at www.beyond3d.com for in depth analysis, and www.nvnews.net has the best of the fanboys/ex-fanboys discussing it. (Our team at www.elitebastards.com is still the best at keeping up with all the latest stories though...
- "When I say dance, you'd best DANCE motherf*cker!" -Violent Femmes