Valve talks Half-Life 2 performance
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Gabe Newell discusses the benchmark mode in Half-Life 2 and provides numbers hinting at how ATI and Nvidia cards will perform in the game.
At a press event held today in Seattle, Valve's Gabe Newell outlined the benchmark features integrated in Half-Life 2 and provided performance numbers comparing how the game will perform on various graphics cards. Newell endorsed ATI's graphics cards, which perform significantly better in the game, according to the provided performance scores. He also announced that the standalone Half-Life 2 benchmark will be available to the press on September 30.
Newell emphasized that Half-Life 2 has been developed as a DirectX 9 game, and said that it has taken Valve a large amount of additional effort to let Nvidia's range of DX9 cards play the game with DX9 effects enabled. Valve has created a special "mixed mode" option for Nvidia cards that substantially increases framerates for the high-end GeForce 5900 Ultra (from a score of roughly 30fps in the Half-Life 2 benchmark to a score of just under 50fps). However, Nvidia's less expensive cards, the GeForce 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra both post scores of just 10 to 15 frames per second in the same test. The provided test numbers were from a system equipped with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor.
In comparison with the high-end Nvidia card, the ATI Radeon 9600 and 9800 Pro perform much better in the Half-Life 2 test's "full precision" mode. According to Newell's presentation, the GeForce 5900 Ultra scores 30fps in this test, whereas the Radeon 9600 Pro scores 48fps and the Radeon 9800 Pro scores just over 60fps.
The mainstream Nvidia cards post higher numbers when running in DirectX 8 mode, though it's yet unclear as to how this affects the game's visual quality. Scores for both the 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra are about 10fps higher in DX8 than DX9. This indicates that the more affordable cards in Nvidia's lineup have to be run in DirectX 8 mode to achieve playable performance of over 20 frames per second.
We'll post more details based on running our own tests with the Half-Life 2 benchmark soon, which should shed more light on how the cards perform at different resolutions and settings.
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Nvidia's Half-Life 2 comments
News
The graphics card maker responds to Valve's unfavorable characterization of Nvidia cards' DirectX 9 performance.
Nvidia has responded to Half-Life 2 performance comments made by Valve's Gabe Newell yesterday by saying that it will soon release new graphics card drivers that will significantly improve performance in Valve's game. The test numbers that Newell presented yesterday were run with the currently available ATI and Nvidia drivers, specifically the v45 series driver that Nvidia first released some time ago and the version 3.7 driver ATI released just recently.
Nvidia has a new v50 scheduled for release in the coming weeks that the company had been working with Valve to optimize for Half-Life 2. For this reason, Nvidia expressed surprise over Newell's negative comments about the v50 driver and the fact that he said that the driver shouldn't be used for benchmark testing. About the results derived from the v45 drivers, the company claimed that the "performance numbers are invalid" because they do not use the v50 drivers, which will be released before Half-Life 2 is publicly available.
One of Newell's comments that Nvidia didn't dispute is that it takes developers extra effort to create DirectX 9 effects that run well on GeForce FX cards. Nvidia has, however, created automatic optimization software for DirectX 9 shader effects and said that "the fruits of these efforts will be seen in our v50 driver release" and that "many other improvements have also been included in v50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of, the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2."
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