Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 2 - Mainstream DX8/DX9 Battle
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2004 6:35 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
A Pretty Decent DirectX 7
The second most popular Half Life 2 GPU according to Valve’s own statistics is the GeForce4 MX. As a quick refreshed, the GeForce4 MX is basically a GeForce2 MX with an updated memory controller, so its feature set will not be DirectX 8 compliant like the GeForce4, rather it is more of a DX7 part. So what do you lose if you’ve got an older card like a GeForce2, GeForce4 MX or original Radeon?
Of course the water quality in DX7 mode is similar to what we saw in DX8 mode, but there are much larger sacrifices made in DX7 mode.
For starters, features like bump mapping are gone, making the levels look significantly worse than when using the DX8 path. The screenshot below shows Valve’s DX8 path at work, mouse over to see what you lose by going to DX7:
Hold mouse over image to see DX7 mode
While you could argue that there’s not too big of a difference between DX9 and DX8 (other than the water), everything looks significantly worse in DX7 mode.
The other big change is that in DX7 mode the draw distances are significantly reduced, so what you notice are that certain objects will slowly fade in the closer you get to them. For example, staring into the distance we see nothing in front of the chain link fence:
Stepping forward we begin to see something faint fade in:
Moving in a little closer we see the green dumpster completely:
Another few steps and we see two more objects faintly appear:
A little further and we see two trashcans appear as well:
Running in DX7 mode does sacrifice quite a bit, but the game is extremely playable as you are about to see. If you have the ability to run in a higher quality mode then you definitely should, but what’s most important is that even in DX7 mode Half Life 2 looks better than any other DX7 title. At the same time Half Life 2 in DX7 mode runs and looks better than newer games on graphics hardware that’s now four years old. You can download all of the screenshots on this page in an uncompressed format here.
Let’s see how well the GeForce4 MX runs in DirectX 7 mode…
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abakshi - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Just a note - the last graph on page 7 seems to be a bit messed up -- the GeForce 6200 is shown as 82.3 FPS - higher than all of the over cards - while the data chart and line graph show it as 53.9 FPS.KrikU - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Why cant we see benchmarks with AA & AF enabled with mainstream graphics cards? HL2 is using a such engine that is only CPU limited, so AA & AF tests are really welcome!Im playing with ti4400 (o/c to ti4600 speeds) with AA 2x & AF 2x! This is first such new game where I can use these image quality enhancements with my card!
T8000 - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Half life 2 seems to be designed around the Radeon 9700.Because Valve seems to have made certain promises to ATI, they where not allowed to optimize any Geforce for DX9.
This also shows with the GF6200, that should be close to the R9600, but is not, due to the optimized Radeon 9700 codepath.
Luckely, Valve was hacked, preventing this game from messing up the marketplace. Now, almost any card can play it and Nvidia may even be tempted to release a patch in their driver to undo Valves DX9 R9700 cheats and make the game do DX9 the right way for FX owners, without sacrificing any image quality. Just to prove Valve wrong.
draazeejs - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
Well, I like HL2 a lot, much more so than the pitch-black, ugly-fuzzy texture D3. But, honestly - to me it looks exactly like Far Cry, engine-wise. Is there any difference?Respect to the level-designers of HL2, none of the games comes even close nowadays to that sort of detail and scenery. Also I think the physics of the people and faces and AI is by far superior. And the Raven-yard is much more scary than the whole D3 :)))
kmmatney - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
[sarcasm] Oh, and have fun running those DX games on other platforms without emulation. [/sarcasm]Obviously, this game isn't meant for other platforms, and that's fine by me. I think the original half-life had an OpenGL option, but it sucked (at least on my old Radeon card). In general, OpenGL has always been a pain, dating back to the old miniGL driver days. In my experience, when playing games that had either a Dx or OpenGL option, the DX option has usually been more reliable. It sould be because I usually have ATI based cards...
kmmatney - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
I didn't mean that DX literally "looks" better than OpenGl, I meant that it seems to be more versatile. Here's a game that can be played comfortably over several generations of video cards. You have to buy a new one to play D3 at decent resolution. The HL2 engine seems to have room to spare in terms of using DX 9 features, so the engine can be further enhanced in the future. I would think this game engine would be preferred over the Doom3 engine.oneils - Sunday, November 21, 2004 - link
#15, Steam's site (under "updates") indicates that the stuttering is due to a sound problem, and that they are working on a fix. Hopefully this will help you.vladik007 - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
" I'm missing words to how pathetic that is. "1st my post was no.2 NOT no.3.
2nd unlike many people i dont have time to work on my personal computers all the time. IF i dont upgrade this holliday season , i'll possibly have to wait until summer vacation. And you dont see nforce4 out now , do you ?
3rd No it's not pathetic to follow something that's never failed me. Ever heard of satisfied customer ? Well Abit has always treated me very well , RMA proccess , crossshiping , bios updates , good support on official forums ... etc Why on earth should i change ?
4th got it ?
moletus - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
I really would like to see some ATI 8500-9200 results too..Pannenkoek - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
#18: It depends on what features of the videocards are used for how a game will look like, and the art. It's not dirct3d vs opengl, the videocards are the limiting factor. Doom III is just too dark, and that's because of an optimization used in the shadowing. ;-)#26: Surely you mean "#2", I'm all for AMD. Not that my current computer is not pathetic compared with what's around nowadays...