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
#61.. i take it YOU have the money to shell out for top of the line hardware ????????? i sure as hell don't, but like #42 said, " more widely used comp "i my self am running a 1700+ at 2400+ speeds, no way in hell am i gonna go spend the 930 bucks ( in cdn funds )on a 3.2c P4, thats NOT inc the mobo and ram, and i'm also not gonna spend the 700 cdn on a barton 3200+ either, for the price of the above P4 chip i can get a whole decient comp, may not be able to run halflife at its fullest, but still, i'm not even interested in HL2, it just not the kind of game i play, but if i was, whay i typed above, is still valid..
anand... RUN THESE HL2 BENCHES ON HARDWARE THE AVERAGE PERSON CAN AFFORD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! not he spoiled rich kid crap .....
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#42 "...should have benchmarked on a more widely used computer like a 2400 or 2500+ AMD...":The use of 'outdated' hardware such as your 2400 AMD would have increased the possibility of cpu limitations taking over the benchmark. Historically all video card benchmarks have used the fastest (or near fastest) GPU available to ensure the GPU is able to operate in the best possible scenario. If you want to know how your 2400 will work with HL2, wait and buy it when it comes out.
In reference to the 16/32 bit floating point shaders and how that applies to ATI's 24 bit shaders:
It was my understanding that this quote was referencing the need for Nvidia to use it's 32 bit shaders as future support for its 16 bit shaders would not exist. I don't see this quote pertaining to ATI's 24 bit shaders as they meet the DX9 specs. The chance of future HL2 engine based games leaving ATI users out in the cold is somewhere between slim and none. For an example of how software vendor's react to leaving out support for a particular line of video card, simply look at how much work Valve put into making Nvidia's cards work. If it was feasible for a software vendor to leave out support for an entire line like your are refering to (ATI in your inference) we would have had HL2 shipping by now (for ATI only though...).
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
58, http://myweb.cableone.net/jrose/Jeremy/HL2.jpgAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Are pixel shader operations anti-aliased on current generation video cards? I ask because in the latest Half Life 2 technology demo movie, anti-aliasing is enabled. Everything looks smooth except for the specular highlights on the roof and other areas, which are still full of shimmering effects. Just seems a little sore on the eyes.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
An observation:Brian Burke = Iraqi Information Officer
I mean this guy rode 3dfx into the dirt nap and he's providing the same great service to Nvidia.
Note to self: Never buy anything from a company that has this guy spewing lies.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
OK, this article was great.For us freaks, can you do a supplement article. Do 1600x1200 benchmarks!!!
Things will probably crawl, but it would be nice to know that this should be the worst case at this resolution when ATI and NVidia come out with next gen cards.
Also, was any testing done to see if the benchmarks were CPU or GPU limited? Maybe use the CPU utilization montior in Windows o see what the CPU thought. maybe a 5.0 GHz processor down the road will solve some headaches. Doubtful, but maybe....
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Whats really funny is that Maximum PC magazine built an $11000 "Dream Machine", using a GeforeFX 5900 and i can built a machine for less then $2000 and beat it using a 9800 pro.Long Live my 9500 pro!
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I can play Frozen Throne and I am doing so on a GeForce2MX LOL (on a P2@400mhz).Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
look at my #46 posting - i know it's different engines, different API's, different driver revisions etc...but still it's interesting..
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#52 different engines, different results. hl 2 is probably more shader limited than doom 3. The 9600pro has strong shader performance, which narrows the gap in shader limited situations such as hl 2.btw, where did you get those doom 3 results? Only doom 3 benches I know about are based off the old alpha or that invalid test from back when the nv35 was launched...