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Half-Life 2, ATI, NVIDIA, and a Sack of Cash

Posted by michael on from the in-the-library-with-the-candlestick dept.

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?"

4 of 412 comments (clear)

  1. Conspiracy Theorists by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:cant be that bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:gaming is big business now... by Apiakun · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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).

  4. but.... by Cassius105 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    if Valve did ptimize HL2 for ATI

    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? :P