Half-Life 2 (PC)

[nips]

Ha, I'm such a chump. I read 'meeting up' and chose to omit 'In a server'.

Maybe it was blind hope, as I'm on a 56K connection and could never play unless it was a LAN.

Sorry about that, but either way, sounds good. I may take my PC down the school and see if I can use their connection to play, if I can stop thier firewall.

Goodnight

... ... /me leave slowly...

[Spatial]

Time for another one of these to amuse us in these potential pre-gold times :-




Also check out :-

Made it to the big time baby !

No real new info but shows the waves this games making I suppose

[Spatial]

Ever wondered where they got the inspiration for old Gordan Freeman ?

Here it is :-




Thats Marc Laidlaw who scripted both games. The closest you'll ever get to a real life Freeman ( but with less hair )

[Fire]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1862

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.

And in other news, owners of ?400 'Nvidia Geforce FX' cards were seen hurling their personal computers from upper floor windows.

[Adam]

eerrgh, now I'm worried. If the best graphics card can only get 60fps then I hate to imagine what my GeForce4mx 420 will be like

[Adam]

Gabe Newell said the benchmark will be released on September 30th. Meh

[Fire]

The FPS figures are average FPS, not peak.

I'd say 60fps as an average for the whole E3 demo is pretty good.

[Super Stu]

Aye, I wouldn't be too concerned. I expect those ATI boys are running AA and AS and all sorts to make the picture quality even better, stuff which us lesser gf4 mortals avoid

Anyway, it's no different from the HL1 situation tbh - If you were lucky back then (using my hazy memory here lads) you had a p233mmx and it sorta ran not bad in software mode. If you were posh you had a voodoo1 and it flew along in 640x480. It wasn't long after that the PC started caining the engine then.

Give it time - you'll be able to run the hl2 engine on ?100 of hardware

[Fire]

Supposedly all of the benchmarks were done in 1024x768 with no AA or AF. Results being the average FPS from the whole of the 22minute E3 demonstration

Geforce FX cards getting spanked in pure DX9 mode (as it should be, the whole point of the DX standard is so that you don't have to bodge ways to render with decent performance at the cost of quality on a certains manufacturor's cards) Radeon 9600 in the chart refers to Radeon 9600pro




I guess this means that you won't be wanting to run in DX9 mode on a Geforce FX. Valve recommends running in DX8.1 mode:



At which point you see the now humble GF4 Ti4600 card as being the 2nd fastest Nvidia card for HL2, great stuff

[Super Stu]

lol

I managed to get the old girl up to 4400 speeds the other night, seems rock solid. Looks like HL2 won't be too **** on this box after all

[evilmatt]

The Det 50's are on the way (with HL2 optimisations) so no need for NVidia owners to throw themselves out of buildings just yet. The PS2.0 performance is reportedly much improved, which is the main stumbling block with HL2/DX9. Those benchies are taken with the crappy 45.33 drivers

Besides... HL2 bundled with an ATi card..... no Valve aren't in the least bit likely to help out a strategic partner with their gfx engine over a competitor, honest. Its business, you can't trust any of them as far as you can throw them!

[Fire]

Except the reason they've went for ATI is because of results like these which Valve have seen all along during development with their own benchmark results.

I'd say theres a business alliance because of the results, not results because of the alliance.

About the drivers - I thought the main argument against ATI was always bleh, good cards but they have poor drivers, not up to the standard of Nvidias. Surely the latest drivers that Nvidia are offering for download on their page should be the highest quality and best performing yet? More to the point, why should the game be stumbling with any of their drivers? HL2 is purely standard DX9 which is exactly what the now mature Geforce FX is designed for - it shouldnt need special optimisations or hack jobs to up framerate at the expense image quality just to work reasonably.

[Spatial]

Oh god this graphics malarky is making my head spin

So, let me get this straight, as there's so many different answers and questions at the moment....

Clearly a Radeon is pick of the bunch when it comes to HL2.

But isn't there a new ATI card expected soon ? So if I buy a top of the range one now, is it going to be redundent even quicker than usual with PC hardware ?

How will a Radeon be for future proofing my system for a while ? Is it going to run Deus Ex 2 and Doom 3 next year and be as graphically stunning as I need it to be (ie:- very ) ?

When are the new NV Detenator drivers out ? I've heared 6 months time !

[Ciaran]

If you buy an ATI 9800Pro 128mb it should run "Deus Ex 2 and Doom 3 next year and be as graphically stunning as I need it to be (ie:- very ) ?"

But ATI are going to be releasing a 256mb version soon (don't know how soon) but it will prolly be very expensive. EDIT - Rep has just informed me it is already out and is only a small jump in performance in current games.

On the other hand if you buy a Nvidia card the future doesn't look good, as its already having problems running HL2.

[replicant]

some more details from tech sites-

nVidia has been circulating its Det50 driver to analysts in hopes that we would use it for our Half-Life 2 benchmarking. The driver contains application-specific optimizations that will likely improve nVidia's overall performance picture, however Valve's Gabe Newell expressed concerns that some of nVidia's optimizations may go too far. Doug Lombardi of Valve has explicitly asked that beta versions of the Det50 drivers not be used for benchmarking.


and

He said they had seen cases where fog was completely removed from a level in one of Valve's games, by the graphics driver software, in order to improve performance. I asked him to clarify which game, and he said it was Half-Life 2. Apparently, this activity has gone on while the game is still in development. He also mentioned that he's seen drivers detect screen capture attempt and output higher quality data than what's actually shown in-game.

I cant beleive that Nvidia actually made their drivers detect and remove fog to aid performance. This is madness!

some more points

Well what can be said for this?

? You buy a product from Nvidia.. You are splitting the market into Nvidia Optimised and Microsoft Optimised.. NV3X/MS HLSL. It's just a matter of time until Nvidia releases a new set of Detonator drivers that will force lower precision for Half-Life 2. Remember, Nvidia plays by their own rules and not by the standards. Now everyone can thank Nvidia for making Developers spend more time optimizing the game for Nvidia cards, and less time on the quality of the game.

? Looking back at the 3DMark03 farce and how Nvidia put them down. 3DMark was actually right, those synthetic benchmarks were absolutely spot on. However, can we see Nvidia trying to put Valve down? We are only seeing the beginning of it now.

? As I have said before.. the FX5900 IS a DX 8.5 card. Please don't argue with me, but take the issue up with Valve. After all, they suggest playing in DX8 mode, if you own one.

? Please label yourself stupid, if you really think that Valve optimised for the Radeon. In fact they built and optimised for the Microsoft HLSL. Which the latest Radeon series is closely matched too.. If Nvidia weren't so PIG HEADED and built a card that did the same thing, we would not be in this MESS.

? If in the event, it is proven that with the Det 50.x drivers.. Nvidia are doing untoward things with shaders, or cheating. Then before you post your reaction when owning an Nvidia card.. Is your investment actually delievering what it promised..?

? Finally, oh if you want to quote Doom3 benchmarks.. Go ahead.. Just remember, they are only faster (like 4 months ago) because Carmack HAD to code a special path just like Valve here, as the Nvidia hardware would not run the "standard" DX9 in the case of Microsoft, and ARB2 in the case of OpenGL. Thats right, ARB2 benchmarks for Nvidia are 50% behind ATi.. which runs the "standard".