HL2 Perf. Comments

[bsdgeek]

You'll see my own numbers tomorrow night at midnight, but we've been given the go ahead to reveal a bit of information about Half-Life 2. I'll keep it brief and to the point and will explain it in greater detail tomorrow night:

- Valve is pissed at all of the benchmarking "optimizations" they've seen in the hardware community;
- Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;
- Valve recommends running geforce fx 5200 and 5600 cards in dx8 mode in order to get playable frame rates.
- even with the special NV3x codepath, ATI is the clear performance leader under Half-Life 2 with the Radeon 9800 Pro hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The 5900 ultra is noticeably slower with the special codepath and is horrendously slower under the default dx9 codepath;
- the Radeon 9600 Pro performs very well - it is a good competitor of the 5900 ultra;
- ATI didn't need these special optimizations to perform well and Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.

There you have it folks, there's much more coming tomorrow.

[Helevitia]

Nothing makes me happier

[bsdgeek]

I don't really care much about the game anymore because of the Steam BS, but what made me happy is linking it before it showed up on Beyond3D.

[Helevitia]

I think the steam thing is probably blown way out of proportion just like windows activation and most people will by the game anyway.

Dave

[Wombat]

Yeah, you'll say that right until your broadband link is down and you're not allowed to play the damn game.

[Helevitia]

We shall see... It'll be interesting to see how Valve handles it if it is truly a negative issue for them.

Dave

[Jon P. Inghram]

Supposedly Cat 3.8 is going to have "a big surprise" in it, people suspect it's either application specific optimizations, or possible something related to HL 2.

[GNEP]

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=164590

They got charts now

[bsdgeek]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Supposedly Cat 3.8 is going to have "a big surprise" in it, people suspect it's either application specific optimizations, or possible something related to HL 2.

Det 50s do too, supposedly a new runtime compiler for pixel shading that will bring huge (legal) boosts. Well, we will see in a week or so, apparently.

[thop]

Steam will only be required if you want to play online, so if your connection goes down you cant play online anyway. However i don't like that they try to force their steam service down my throat. I've checked it out and deinstalled it faster than my grandma can say schwarzenegger.

[thop]

It appears the beyond3d server crashed under the load.

[bsdgeek]

Originally posted by thop
Steam will only be required if you want to play online, so if your connection goes down you cant play online anyway. However i don't like that they try to force their steam service down my throat. I've checked it out and deinstalled it faster than my grandma can say schwarzenegger.

No, it must be authenticated every time you want to play LAN or Single player.

[GT98]

thing i wonder about is Valve stated that you could run it on a Geforce3 with a 1Ghz machine....from these charts it looks like it puts a hurting on the top end equipment at 1024x768.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Well... considering that Microsoft says HL2 is great, I'm really starting to worry.

[Wombat]

Originally posted by Jon P. Inghram
Well... considering that Microsoft says HL2 is great, I'm really starting to worry.

Microsoft was later overheard, "<I>Half-Life</I> 2!?! Shit! We meant Halo 2. It rocks, and rocks hardest on the X-Box."