Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
When we first heard Gabe Newell's words, what came to mind is that this is the type of excitement that the 3D graphics industry hasn't seen in years. The days where we were waiting to break 40 fps in Quake I were gone and we were left arguing over whose anisotropic filtering was correct. With Half-Life 2, we are seeing the "Dawn of DX9" as one speaker put it; and this is just the beginning.
The performance paradigm changes here; instead of being bound by memory bandwidth and being able to produce triple digit frame rates, we are entering a world of games where memory bandwidth isn't the bottleneck - where we are bound by raw GPU power. This is exactly the type of shift we saw in the CPU world a while ago, where memory bandwidth stopped being the defining performance characteristic and the architecture/computational power of the microprocessors had a much larger impact.
One of the benefits of moving away from memory bandwidth limited scenarios is that enhancements that traditionally ate up memory bandwidth, will soon be able to be offered at virtually no performance penalty. If your GPU is waiting on its ALUs to complete pixel shading operations then the additional memory bandwidth used by something like anisotropic filtering will not negatively impact performance. Things are beginning to change and they are beginning to do so in a very big way.
In terms of the performance of the cards you've seen here today, the standings shouldn't change by the time Half-Life 2 ships - although NVIDIA will undoubtedly have newer drivers to improve performance. Over the coming weeks we'll be digging even further into the NVIDIA performance mystery to see if our theories are correct; if they are, we may have to wait until NV4x before these issues get sorted out.
For now, Half-Life 2 seems to be best paired with ATI hardware and as you've seen through our benchmarks, whether you have a Radeon 9600 Pro or a Radeon 9800 Pro you'll be running just fine. Things are finally heating up and it's a good feeling to have back...
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uturnsam - Friday, November 28, 2003 - link
#110 continuedNow I know why the guy behind the counter told me to steer clear of the ATI Radeon cards because of the known compatability problems when running games.
(Computer sales guy thinking-I just read the article in the AnandTech post)
Translated: I have a shit load of Nvidia cards and if I don't lie my ass off to my Customer's it will be game over for me!!!
The only reason I started looking at ATI cards was I decided to spend what I saved on the CRT monitor (over the $$LCD) for higher performer card. Mr $Sales$ had me convinced I would be buying an inferior card with ATI. Worth shopping around and scouring reviews :O)
uturnsam - Friday, November 28, 2003 - link
I was going to buy a Geforce5600 but looked at a 9600Pro today the thing is I was wondering if I should really blow the budget and lash out on a 9800Pro.I am so glad I came across this article I will stick with the 9600Pro, save some cash, sleep better at night and know when half life 2 is released I will be getting the best performance for the outlay.
Anonymous User - Thursday, October 16, 2003 - link
you can count on your 9500 being in between the 9800 and the 9600, about 30% frame rate above the 9600. the 4 pipelines will help.Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 30, 2003 - link
I would like to see a test of the dx8 paths on some of the really older cards for those of us who are too broke for these new ones!!For instance, I have a geforce2 GTS that I love very much and works just fine on everything else. I don't want to have to upgrade for one game.
Anonymous User - Sunday, September 21, 2003 - link
I would like to see how they compare with a 5900 using Detonator 44.03 driver. Yes I know its an older driver. But in my tests it provided higher benchmarcks than the 45.23 driver.Has any body else noticed this?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 19, 2003 - link
So actually Nvidia shader(16/32) are notcomparable with ATI shader(24-ms dx9 standard)!
Too bad in a way or another they try to cheat
again and again.......
Very bad idea!
Anonymous User - Tuesday, September 16, 2003 - link
#104, the benchmarks and anand's analysis show that hl2 is gpu power limited, not memory/fillrate limited... the 9600 will be limited more by that than by memory or fillrate.Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
I think #84 mentioned this, but I didn't see a reply. In the benches, the 9600 pro pulled the exact same (to within .1 fps, which could just be roundoff error) frame rates at 1024 and 1280.I don't think I've ever seen a card bump up res without taking a measurable hit (unless it was cpu-limited). In every other game, the 9600 takes a hit going from 1024 to 1280. And the 9700 and 9800 slow down when the resolution goes up, even though they're basically the same architecture. Someone screwed up, either the benchmarks or the graphs.
Anonymous User - Monday, September 15, 2003 - link
#61 Did you take the time to see that valve limited their testing use. Anandtech had no say in all the tests because they were very time limited. Also, try to make coherent sentences.Anonymous User - Sunday, September 14, 2003 - link
It's not as if GIFs gobble bandwidth, I (as CAPTAIN DIALUP) don't even notice them loading. They're tiny. Even though I don't have trouble receiving this Flash stuff, it pisses me off, because sometimes the same scores will load for all the pages. Why not have a poll or something on this?