Half Life 2 NVIDIA benchmarks

[Guest]

I saw a couple of articles relating to HL2 and benchmarking and NVIDIA and thought I'd pass on the links. Not sure if you've seen these, posted 11th and 12th of Sep.

Half-Life 2 NVIDIA benchmark on Tom's Hardware web site (http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030912/index.html)

Valve Half-Life 2 Benchmark Numbers (http://www.tomshardware.com/business/20030911/index.html)

Cheers,
Max

[Guest]

Indeed this is huge news and it's all over the Rage3D Forums (A Pro-ATi site). Nvidia have really screwed the pooch this year (So to speak). First they 'tweaked' 3DMark2003 so it would favour their cards then they tried to hide the fact after FutureMark pulled them up on it. Then they (obviously) got their lawyers to silence Futremark because a few days later Futremark said 'Oh they're just optimizations - nothing to see here move along'. What really happened is that reviewers get a different version of 3DMark2003 from you and me. They can actually freeze the test and output the frame buffer ect. Nvidia were actually REMOVING FRAMES (A very tedious task let me tell you) so their card didn't have as much work to do. Suddenly the Ge-Force FX 5800 & 5900 Ultra were getting great scores in this DirectX 9.0 benchmark. Now it gets even more interesting....

Valve had a 'Developer weekend' just recently and man they shit-canned Nvidia saying they had to write very specialized code just to get HL2 to run with respectable FPS on a 5900 Ultra. The benchmarks clearly put ATi's Radeon WAY ahead of Nvidia's card. Do you know why? Because the GF-FX 5900 Ultra is not actually a DirectX 9.0 Card! Yep! It has SOME DirectX 9.0 functionality but at it's heart it's still a DirectX 8.1 card! LOL that is PATHETIC. Now Hl2 comes along which is the first DirectX 9.0 game and boy has it really shown Nvidia up badly. Gabe Newell absolutely bagged the crap out of Nvidia because he knows they have enough money to give Nvidia the finger. Radeon 9700 Pro & Radeon 9800 Pro are TRUE DirectX 9.0 cards - they support the whole box & dice at a hardware level.

Nvidia has since had to tell the people who went out and spent uber dollars on a GFFX 5900 Ultra that they'll need 'specially optimized' drivers (The 50.XX Series) to get HL2 to run at all. What they HAVEN'T told you is that they are sacrificing image quality in order to get the frames up. Not only that Valve have had to code around their crap hardware just to get the thing to run it at any sort of playable framerate.

So if you want to play HL2 the way it was intended? Buy a Radeon 9700 Pro or (soon) Radeon 9800XT.

Cheers

Blade