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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?"
"Whatever happened to just making hardware, and making games?" unfortunately..where there's a multi-billion dollar industry, there's shady business deals.
Nvidia didnt create a card that far behind the curve - it has to be drivers.
Smooth transaction!
What my Rendition Verite card is old now? Come on guys, is this difference really that much at all?
Hmm, cash and industry. How does it pan out? If "Shader Day" wasn't enough for you, keep having fun trashing the chipset you chose.
"When it rains, it pours." --Morton's Salt
About all the article in the inquirer says is that Valve put the bundling rights for HL2 up for grabs. Makes sense.
I don't think that article says anything about one hardware platform being better than the other, and I don't doubt that had NVidia won the bundling deal, they would've had a "NVidia Shader Day" event, regardless of the performance of the product.
I still find the most interesting point being that Valve says that they had to put in a lot more time and effort making the gaming experience on NVidia cards good than on ATI cards, to the point of developing a seperate graphics path for NVidia chips.
If the solution to the performance issues was a simple driver update from NVidia (WITHOUT degrading quality in any way), then surely Valve would've left it to Nvidia to handle and proceeded to spend their time working on the game iteself...
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Maybe I'm just dumb but it doesn't seem to make much sense to release new hardware without drivers optimized to take full advantage of the hardware. If you (or a hardware site) has to wait for a new driver to get the performance the vendor specifies for the hardware, I would be real leary of buying hardware from them. From what I saw of the ATI/NVIDA test, the NVIDA card was trounced, so maybe NVIDA should hold off on releasing new cards until their drivers catch up to the hardware.
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
the 45.xx detonator drivers were used for the Nvidia cards because that is the final working driver Nvidia released. The 50.xx which NVidia says should have been used doesn't show fog, which they call a bug and just so happens to create better results. Also the 50.xx drivers were still beta last time I heard. So Valve chose a stable driver over a "bugged" one. Not to mention NVidia's earlier actions surrounding "driver enhancements" wouldn't make them suspicious.
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.
Let's see how Half Life 2 will run on my 3DFX Voodoo 1 & S3 Virge!
Hate me!
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.
And let us take a crack at them. Suddenly you'll have NetBSD running directly on the card, twice the framerate in Linux as in windows, and (worst of all) both companies' products will be advanced, eliminating the advantage over one's competitor by tossing more money at the problem.
Betterment serves no profitable purpose unless it is unatainable by one's competitor. If someone can show how they'll make more money by making a better product while also aiding their competitor in the same endeavor, they might help us out a bit more.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
What scares me is people doing those benchs in DirectX, and most, people doing games using DirectX. Nvidia certainly didn't made its card to perform good in DirectX's new API, and I don't see the problem.
What's about OpenGL; I only purchase OpenGL games, because I mostly can make them run in Linux, and WineX is only a ugly workaround to run games in non native enviroment. If I'd a game company, I'd take care of potential Linux customers.
The view of nVidia fanboys is this: Valve and ATi are in bed together and have been for a while, and Valve sabotaged Half-Life 2 so it wouldn't run on NV3x properly in return for a whole bundle of money from ATi. Never mind that this wouldn't make any business sense-- you see, Majestic 12 are the REAL ones behind this, and we can't possibly know what they have in store for the world.
The view of ATi fanboys is this: Anyone who bought a GeForce FX is an idiot, as they obviously should have had a stolen timedemo of Half-Life 2 on hand to benchmark with. If they didn't break into Valve's offices and steal the code, that's their own fault. Also, nVidia is clearly exactly like 3dfx, because they slipped up, JUST LIKE 3DFX! Dun dun dunnn!(The Quake/Quack scandal involving ATi never existed, of course.)
The view of most sane, rational human beings is that this is just another stage of the highly competitive video card market, and that anyone who spends time arguing over which company is better needs to be tranquilized, preferably with something meant for very large animals.
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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Raw power, eh. That must be why the Radeon 9700 Pro, with a GPU clock of 325MHz, was equivalent to the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, with a GPU clock of 500MHz. The Radeon 9700 Pro was so focused on raw power that it put out a whopping fifty-seven watts of heat to the 5800 Ultra's mere eighty! The 5800 Ultra had a far more sophisticated cooling system, of course, which consisted of a copper heatsink that stole a PCI slot and a banshee-like fan. Now that's what I call finesse! Do your homework before you post :P
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?
There written for some type of graphics API, DirectX and/or OpenGL. The days of writing to bare hardware were over more then a decade ago.
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
Parent is on crack. Absolutely nothing in your post is true. ATI has had a superior gpu architecture since the radeon 9700 pro hit the market a year ago.
The Nvidia FX series has been plagued with problems from the get go, with Nvidia resorting to a
massive pr blitz and outright cheating in their drivers to compete with ATI.
Parent post is truly laughable and shows an ignorance of what has transpired over the last year in the video card industry.
They made a deal with Valve, eh? Then why is it that many independent sources (including the developers of AquaMark 3 and John Carmack) have noticed that NV3x has a lot of trouble with PS2.0 and that to get good performance out of it you have to program a special path? And why is it that NV3x clearly only has 16-bit and 32-bit precision when the DX9 specs call for 24-bit? Don't you think this could account for NV3x's terrible "real" DX9 performance? Don't be so quick to jump to conclusions. That having been said, ATi's Linux driver support is shameful, although they ARE working on it. I think they're both fine companies, it's just silly to accuse one of cheating when there's so much evidence to support what Valve is saying.
"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"?
ATI bought the guys who did the chip for the Gamecube, and they did clean paper DX9 design for ATI. ATI went from being a year behind NVidia (DX8 generation) to being a year ahead.
In the R300, ATI decided to do all their calculations in 24 bit floating point: essentially a pure next-gen chip. The NVidia Geforce FX design was based on their DX8 chips, which were far and away industry leaders in fixed-point calculations; NVidia didn't figure that floating-point performance would be very important this generation and tacked it on. What they ended up with was a chip that had a high transistor count, was very good at legacy, fixed-point operations but could not keep up with ATI in floating point. Even then (about a year ago) NVidia's chip might have been competitive but they had process problems that made the chip clock slower than expected and about 9 months late.
ATI's superiority in floating point shaders has been demonstrated by various benchmarks (including some open-source benchmarks, which are the only ones I really take seriously) time and again. NVidia can only be competitive this generation when they 'tweak' their drivers for particular benchmarks. These tweaks sometimes consist of rewriting floating-point shaders to use their legacy fixed-point functionality, and on some occasions of even using pre-generated shadow models to replace the dynamically generated models of benchmarks that run over a known scene.
NVidia's NV3x generation seems weak, compared to ATI, and very weak unless game coders ignore API standards and write custom shaders that do as much as possible in NVidia's legacy hardware. Of course, by historical standards NVidia's NV3x isn't weak at all--they blow away all their competitors and ATI's pre-R300 products. It's just that the design choices made by ATI's new designers allowed them to leapfrog a generation.
If you look at the FX architecture, it has a serious problem.
It can't run "true" DX9 spec games worth crap.
Why?
Because to save die space, nVIDIA engineers decided it'd be best to use 32 bit FP units, compared to ATi's more numerous 24 bit FP units. DX9 specs call for 24 bit precision computations, which is the ATi native precision (which can then be mapped to 16 or extended to 32 bit precision, if asked for) whereas the FX which has to operate in 32, 16, or 12(?) bit modes basically loses half its registers (or more, if you are comparing to 12 bit registers) because it must run in 32 bit mode to be compliant.
End result? Less high speed registers on the FX part, more swapping from ram and less FP computational power to go around.
And this is only a simple example. I believe it has been noted that that Carmack eluded to many ugly optimizations in using lower precision math or proprietary shader paths he had to make to the D3 engine for the benefit of the FX not sucking utterly in terms of performance. It isn't really a playable DX9 part, all in all.
If valve says they spent serious time working for the Geforce codepath (and indeed, it is quite a bit faster in hyrbid mode, but now they are making it well known that it isn't running "true" dx9, which it the truth. It should also be noted that this hybrid mode is what the D3 benchmark was run in which offered the nVIDIA part such stellar performance, specifically noted by Carmack.) then they probably did so. Either that or they would have mentioned nothing.
Drop the "it must be corporate scandal" bit. If you read some of the specs and dev notes you will note that they more or less universally have their gripes in getting DX9 performance out of the FX part.
After nVidia's falling out with them over the Xbox chipset pricing, its likely MS changed the DX9 spec mid-development and only gave the new specs to ATI. Thats why ATI's cards are perfectly designed to run DX9 but nVidia's specs are off. For example, DX9 calls for 24bit FP, which ATI does, while nVidia only supports 16 or 32bit, forcing developers to choose between correct rendering or improved performance.
Also nVidia is to blame for their driver cheating fiasco, which makes developers especially weary to trust beta or "optimized" drivers, and for expecting every game company to optimize for their cards just because they're the biggest.
With specific reference to OpenGL, games are written in many paths based on the acceleration available on various graphics cards exposed through vendor specific and ARB approved extensions to GL. Drivers optimizations are written both to speed up GL calls and all sorts of other common calculations as well as speed up games by cutting corners. Corners to cut often include what assumptions certain games makes. If a game or game engine makes an assumption such as a static camera, a lot of variable dependencies can be chucked out the window (PTP: pardon the pun) and an "optimization" is born. I would find it hard to believe that a GFX 5800 Ultra would ship with anything less than 75% of the optimal general driver (i.e. nothing game specific or context specific) -- so me thinks the new Detonator 50 has some nice "halflife2.exe" code :P
Oh, and mentioning DirectX before OpenGL in the same breath might mean you like serializing items in a list in alphabetical order... oh no!
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
"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.
Here's Valve's problem: They make moddable games. That's at the core of their business. They didn't just make HalfLife as a game (although they did that, and very well) -- they made it as a platform upon which anyone was free to develop their own FPS games: CounterStrike being the most famous, but there are many others, such as Natural Selection or Day of Defeat.
Likewise, they are not just making HalfLife 2, but a platform upon which mods will be made. But why is this relevant to the videocard debate? Here's where we get back to the drivers.
The drivers -- the mythological r50 drivers that noone's actually gotten their hands on yet -- might well provide a speed boost to HL2 as it stands. Maybe. But if they do, it is because they have hand-tuned those drivers for HL2. See Mr Burke's quote:
What he omits is, the best experience possible for the specific subset of vidoecard functionality currently present in HL2 at this time. A little background for those of you who haven't kept up on recent videocard technology: Modern videocards have Vertex Shaders and Pixel Shaders. These are essentially short programs written in assembler (and now a variant on C) that the driver compiles and executes on the videocard, not the CPU (taking load off of it) that customise rendering in various ways. Vertex shaders typically perform lighting, animation or mesh deformation effects, while pixel shaders provide surface material effects, such as water distortion or bump mapping.
ATI's cards appear to be able to handle any pixel shader program you throw at them. Whether this is because the cards are just that fast and general they can cope with it, or whether the compiler in their driver cunningly optimises any GPU program you throw at it (the same way a C compiler optimises CPU code, by reordering instructions to avoid stalls, factoring out loop invariants, etc) we don't know. Frankly, we don't care: The important thing is, we write code, and it works.
NVidia's cards do not work this way. NVidia's cards are fast, but only if you hand-tune your assembler to precisely match their architecture. Except we don't know enough about their rules to do this (proprietary NVidia technology blah blah).
When Valve have written shaders, found them to be fast on ATI cards and slow on NVidia's cards, NVidia have released new drivers and, lo... it's fast on NVidia's cards. NVidia go "hey, uh, our bad... driver bug... fixed now...". But make even a tiny, trivial change to the shader, and bam: it's slow again. With a little more experimentation along these lines, it's easy to come to the conclusion that there was no bug, there is no fix, NVidia simply have a lookup table of shaders they 'recognise', and when one of those comes along, they replace it with one they wrote themselves, hand-tuned for their card.
There's a problem with this, of course. For a start, if you're not as big as Valve, NVidia aren't going to set aside an engineer to go around optimising shaders for your game or release new drivers. Secondly, if you make any changes you're back to square one and need to resubmit your shader to them and get it fixed up. Thirdly, if like Valve you care about modders, you're not going to be happy with this "solution" -- because even once your game is complete and on store shelves, and NVidia have stopped making new driver releases to 'fix' it, modders can make new shaders. And suddenly find their game runs like ass. You think NVidia are going to go chasing after modders? Bwahaha.
I suspect this is why Valve were careful about the benchmarks they let be
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