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
another thing i just noticed looking at the doom 3 and hl2 benchies.take a look at the performance of 9800pro and 9600pro...
in hl2, the 9800pro is about 27% ahead of the 9600pro, in doom 3 the 9800pro is near 50% faster than the 9600pro. the whole thing just feels weird.
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I'm surprised that Anand mentioned nothing about the comparisons between 4x2 and 8x1 pipelines? Does he even know that MS is working to included paired textures with simutainious wait states for the nV arcitexture? You see the DX9 SDK was developed thinking only one path and since each texture has a defined FIFO during the pass the second pipe in the nV is dormant until the first pipe FIFO operation is complete, with paired textures in the pipe using syncronus wait states this 'problem' will be greatly relieved.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
its fake.... HL2 test are not ready today , great fake Anandtech :)rogerw99 - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#28Ooo Ooo Ooo... I know the answer to that one.
It was Mrs. White, but it wasn't with the gun, it was the lead pipe.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
ATI The Way It Should Be PlayedAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Quote: 'So why is it that in the age of incredibly fast, absurdly powerful DirectX 9 hardware do we find it necessary to bicker about everything but the hardware? Because, for the most part, we've had absolutely nothing better to do with this hardware.'Don't we? Wrong!
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~gfx/pubs/multigridGPU/
;)
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
one thing that i think is kinda interesting. check out this benchmark hardocp did - fx5900 ultra vs. radeon 9800 pro in doom 3 (with help from id software).http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDc0LDE=
after reading this, read carmack's Jan 03 .plan, where he states that under the default openGL codepath, the fx architecture is about half as fast as the r300 - something that is pretty much resembled in the hl2 benchmarks. furthermore he states that using the default path the r300 is clearly superior (+100%), but when converting to vendor-specific codepaths, the fx series is the clear winner.
conclusions? none, but some possibilities
.) ati is better in directx, nvidia in opengl
.) id can actually code, valve cannot
.) and your usual conspiracy theories, feel free to use one you specifically like
bottom line. neither ati nor nvidia cards are the "right ones" at the moment, wait for the next generation of video cards and upgrade THEN.
enigma
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I'm so glad i converted to Ati, i have never regret it & now it feels even better. Ati rulesnotoriousformula - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
i'm sure Nvidia will strike back.. prolly with DOOM III..well till then i'll enjoy my little army of ATI cards: ATI 9800NP>PRO, ATI 9700, ATI 9600PRO :P..long live ATI!!! :DAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Anand should have benchmarked on a more widely used computer like a 2400 or 2500+ AMD. Who here has the money to buy a p4 3Gb 8000mhz FSB cpu?