Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 1 - DirectX 9 Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 17, 2004 11:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
How about a walk on the beach?
Just like in the original Half Life, Half Life 2’s levels are split into multiple parts and are loaded as you encounter them in order to make the game flow more like a story rather than your average first person shooter. Our next benchmark is a continuation of the d2_coast levels: d2_coast_12.
This particular demo takes place on a beach during the early morning. In the demo, our player walks along the beach only to be ambushed by a few soldiers, which he mows through with ease. Here’s where things get interesting though; one of the most stressful shaders in the entire game is located in the d2_coast_12 level. There are a couple of huts armed with machine guns placed on the beach, but to protect the operator of the gun there’s a bit of protective glass much like a windshield at the front of the huts. The glass shaders end up severely reducing frame rate, although with all of the cards we have here the game is still playable.
While it doesn't look like much here, the glass in front of our player causes a pretty decent frame rate drop
Our player stares at the glass of one of these huts for a bit before moving on, finally coming across a couple of enemies in an elevated hut. The player fires a few rockets at the hut, which produce explosions that are also fairly GPU intensive, while being shot at from above. The demo closes with our player tossing a grenade at the enemy hut as a last resort.
We chose this level and section of the game for two reasons: 1) The GPU intensive glass shader we mentioned earlier intrigued us and slowed down even the fastest GPUs, and 2) the level had a lot of good combat which we were lacking from some of the other demos. Once again, you can see how this demo is also typical of Half Life 2 gameplay.
Here, business is as usual with ATI’s X800 XT at the top of the charts, but once again only outperforming the 6800 Ultra by 5%, which is consistent with our first demo. The 6800GT and X800 Pro offer basically identical performance, and the same can be said about the 6800, 6600GT and X700 XT.
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araczynski - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
yawn, i'm too busy enjoy the game (6800gt) to read the article and/or care which card is better :) i'm playing at 1600x1200 0AA/4AF (2.4@3.3/1GB) and have absolutely no complaints, other then knowing that the game will eventually end :(Jeff7181 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
#57... poorly :)blckgrffn - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
I would also like to to see how the 9200/9000 series Radeons perform too, and if you have extra time, the 8500/9100.Again, Thanks!
Jeff7181 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
#16... that's correct, although the only REAL observation that needs to be made is that Half Life 2 makes heavy use of pixel shaders which is very GPU dependant, and GPU's are just now growing the required testicles to process those shaders :)blckgrffn - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Anand -I would like to see how the 6600 performs. As an 8 pipe card, it should perform better than the 9600xt and a little under a 9700 Pro, but it would be interesting to see if that is true. It is a great budget PCIe card along with the x700.
Thanks!
Nat
eva2000 - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
nice review downloaded your demos to run on AMD64 3700+ @ 12x 222 = 2664mhz with 1GB BH-5 @ 222mhz 2-2-2-6 1T and Powercolor X800XT PE @ 520/560 and all demo results were within 3-4fps of the reviews :)Live - Thursday, November 18, 2004 - link
Good reading as always. Would like to see minimum FPS tough. I find it very important to see how low the cards drop when stressed. You can't see that with only average FPS.housecat - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
So... wheres the Nvidia SLI versus ATI results??Muwahahaha.
Avalon - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
Hey Anand, I have an interesting request. Could you try Rivatuner on your 6800, unlock its pipes, and then bench it again? :PJust kidding. Actually, I'm glad you've confirmed what I've been thinking...that AF hasn't been doing much for me. Since I'm running on a lowly 9700, I think I'll just turn it off now, and enjoy a nice speed boost.
PrinceGaz - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
How about throwing a GF 5600 and maybe even a GF 5200 in as well for part 2, as an awful lot of people have them. Ultra versions of either if you prefer.I don't have one of them myself as I'm still using a Ti4200, but it would be interesting to see how they stacked up in the DX8 codepath against the Ti4600 you are planning to test. And it should be worth a giggle to see just how "fast" the 5600 or 5200 can manage the DX9 codepath :)
Thanks to the resolution scaling-graphs this review included and how the fastest cards were generally CPU limited with that A64 4000+ when the resolution was dropped to 1024x768, I'm not sure how much a CPU scaling article for part 3 will show that can't already be quite accurately guesstimated from how different CPUs generally tend to perform in games. But a comparison of the Athlon 64 4000+, against an Athlon XP, a Prescott, a Northwood, and if time permits a fast P3, Duron and Celeron also, would be great.