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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Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand, when using the Print Article feature in Mozilla 1.4, I was shown only graphs from one map throughout. For instance, after clicking Print Article, all graphs were of the bug level. Hitting F5 showed them all to be of techdemo. In both cases, some graphs didn't correspond to your comments.This may be b/c the article was just posted, but thought I'd give you a heads-up anyway.
Thanks for the interesting read, and hopefully we'll see screenshots of the differences between the DX8.0. 8.1, 8.2, NV3x, and DX9 modes soon (the only thing lacking from this article, IMO)!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
.. goddammit, all the flashes are arranged improperly. (Techdemo on bugbait pages, city on techdemo...) FIX IT.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I was hoping anand would compair a 128mb 9800pro to a 256mb one, guess I'll still have to wait =(Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hey Anand, you have a 9500 Pro lying around?Eh, well, it doesn't need to be included anyway. We all know how it would do: 5% worse than the 9700 Pro.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#5 & #6 : +1I ll keep my G4 Ti 4200@300/600.
I m sure HL² will still rocks in DX 8.1
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Where are the numbers with AA/AF enabled? I know the article intimates that there's a negligible performance hit, but I'd still like to see the numbers.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Man, the Ti series has been doing this for a while!http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID...
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I feel the same way about the GF4Ti series. Never did like the FXes much...Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Hahahahaha.Go you Ti4600, GO! I BELIEVE IN THE Ti4600!
If all I am going to lose is a bit of image quality, then no great loss. At least it isn't back to 640x480!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Wow 9800 pro barely edges out 9700 pro. 9600 pro seems to be the best deal if people are still waiting to upgrade.Obviously Nvidia lost this round with nv30 and nv35.