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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dvinnen - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#31: I know what I said. DX9 dosen't require 32 bit. It's not in the spec so you couldn't write shader that uses more than 24bit percision.XPgeek - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Well #26, if the next gen of games do need 32 bit precision, then the tides will once again be turned. and all these "my ATi is so faster than for nVidia" will have to just suck it up and buy another new card, whereas the GFFX's will still be plugging along. by then, who knows, maybe DX10 will support 32 bit precision on the nVidia cards better...btw, im still loading down my GF3 Ti500. so regardless, i will have crappy perf. but i also buy cards from the company i like, that being Gainward/Cardex nVidia based boards. no ATi for me, also no Intel for me. Why? bcuz its my choice. so it may be slower, whoopty-doo!
for all i know, HL2 could run for crap on AMD CPUs as well. so i'll be in good shape then with my XP2400+ and GF3
sorry, i know my opinions dont matter, but i put em here anyhow.
buy what you like, dont just follow the herd... unless you like having your face in everyones ass.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#28 Not 24bit, 32 bit.Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Yeah, like mentioned above, what about whether or not AA and AF were turned on in these tests? Do you talk about it somewhere in your article?I can't believe it's not mentioned since this site was the one that make a detailed (and excellent) presentation of the differences b/w ati and nvdia's AA and AF back in the day.
Strange your benchmarks appear to be silent on the matter. I assume they were both turned off.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
>>thus need full 32-bit precision."<<Huh? Wha?
This is an interesting can of worms. So in the future months time, if ATI stick to 24bit, or cannot develop 32 bit precision, the tables will have reversed on the current situation - but even moreso because there would not be a work around (Or optimization).
Will ATI users in the future accuse Valve of sleeping with Nvidia because their cards cannot shade with 32-bit precision?
Will Nvidia users claim that ATI users are "non-compliant with directX 9"? Will ATI users respond that 24bit precision is the only acceptable standard Direct 9 standard, and that Valve are traitors?
Will Microsoft actually force manufacturers to bloody well wait and force them to follow the standard.
And finally, who did shoot Colonel Mustard in the Dining Room?
Questions, Questions.
dvinnen - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#26: It means it can't cheat and use 16 bit registries to do it and need a full 24bit. SO it would waste the rest of the registryAnonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
#26 That was in reference to the fx cards. They can do 16 or 32 bit precision. Ati cards do 24 bit precision, which is the dx 9 standard.24 bit is the dx 9 standard because it's "good enough." It's much faster than 32 bit, and much better looking then 16 bit. So 16 bit will wear out sooner. Of course, someday 24 bit won't be enough, either, but there's no way of knowing when that'll be.
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
Valve says no benchmarks on Athlon 64! :-/Booo!
Quote:
http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20030911/inde...
"Valve was able to heavily increase the performance of the NVIDIA cards with the optimized path but Valve warns that such optimizations won't be possible in future titles, because future shaders will be more complex and will thus need full 32-bit precision."
The new ATI cards only have 24bit shaders!
So would that make ALL current ATI cards without any way to run future Valve titles?
Perhaps I do not understand the technology fully, can someone elaborate on this?
Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I agree with #23 in terms of money making power the ATI/Valve combo is astounding. ATI's design is superior as we can see but the point is that ATI is going to get truckloads of money and recognition for this. Its a good day to have stock in ATI, lets all thank them for buying ArtX!Anonymous User - Friday, September 12, 2003 - link
I emailed gabe about my 9600 pro, but he didnt have to do all this just for me :DI love it.