Half-Life 2 Performance Benchmark Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 12, 2003 12:34 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
ATI & Valve - Defining the Relationship
The first thing that comes to mind when you see results like this is a cry of foul play; that Valve has unfairly optimized their game for ATI's hardware and thus, it does not perform well on NVIDIA's hardware. Although it is the simplest accusation, it is actually one of the less frequent that we've seen thrown around.
During Gabe Newell's presentation, he insisted that they [Valve] have not optimized or doctored the engine to produce these results. It also doesn't make much sense for Valve to develop an ATI-specific game simply because the majority of the market out there does have NVIDIA based graphics cards, and it is in their best interest to make the game run as well as possible on NVIDIA GPUs.
Gabe mentioned that the developers spent 5x as much time optimizing the special NV3x code path (mixed mode) as they did optimizing the generic DX9 path (what ATI's DX9 cards use). Thus, it is clear that a good attempt was made to get the game to run as well as possible on NVIDIA hardware.
To those that fault Valve for spending so much time and effort trying to optimize for the NV3x family, remember that they are in the business to sell games and with the market the way it is, purposefully crippling one graphics manufacturer in favor of another would not make much business sense.
Truthfully, we believe that Valve made an honest attempt to get the game running as well as possible on NV3x hardware but simply ran into other unavoidable issues (which we will get to shortly). You can attempt to attack the competence of Valve's developers; however, we are not qualified to do so. Yet, any of those who have developed something similar in complexity to Half-Life 2's source engine may feel free to do so.
According to Gabe, these performance results were the reason that Valve aligned themselves more closely with ATI. As you probably know, Valve has a fairly large OEM deal with ATI that will bring Half-Life 2 as a bundled item with ATI graphics cards in the future. We'll be able to tell you more about the cards with which it will be bundled soon enough (has it been 6 months already?).
With these sorts of deals, there's always money (e.g. marketing dollars) involved, and we're not debating the existence of that in this deal, but as far as Valve's official line is concerned, the deal came after the performance discovery.
Once again, we're not questioning Valve in this sense and honestly don't see much reason to, as it wouldn't make any business sense for them to cripple Half-Life 2 on NVIDIA cards. As always, we encourage you to draw your own conclusions based on the data we've provided.
Moving on…
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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?