AnandTech Half-Life 2 Info :)

[Vonkhan]

im not a hardware guru, so please correct me if im wrong.

I will correct u, not because of anything else but 'cuz I dont wanna do my homework ... legal environment (business) ... gah!

they werent TOO far off from each other

Correction, they ARE far away from each other in DX9. Only with the mixed mode (poor Valve ) does the 5900 manage to narrow the gap but not by too much either. No driver fix for the 5900 can help it get even close to the 9800pro in DX9.

Two FUBARs in a row, some1's head is gonna be on the chopping block @ nVIDIA :Q

 

[MaDDaWg1018]

LOL. thanks for the clarification. so from what you guys have said, i guess ill aim toward a radeon in the near future (unless nvidia somehow pulls a miracle out of their @$$).

there goes my vow never to buy ATI again. =)

hmm...one more question. i was looking at two radeons...a 128mb sapphire 9600 pro ultra and a 256mb 9600 pro. which one is better and how? judging from what ive read, its not worth getting the 9700, and i dont feel like shelling out over 250 for a 9800 pro at this point. and how big are the performance differences between the 9800pro and the 9600 pro? thanks again!

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: MaDDaWg1018
LOL. thanks for the clarification. so from what you guys have said, i guess ill aim toward a radeon in the near future (unless nvidia somehow pulls a miracle out of their @$$).

there goes my vow never to buy ATI again. =)

hmm...one more question. i was looking at two radeons...a 128mb sapphire 9600 pro ultra and a 256mb 9600 pro. which one is better and how? judging from what ive read, its not worth getting the 9700, and i dont feel like shelling out over 250 for a 9800 pro at this point. and how big are the performance differences between the 9800pro and the 9600 pro? thanks again!

dont bother with the extra 128mb, you will never ever use it, even Doom3 with highest res textures wont tax out 128mb, will reqire 128mb card though but it wont use all of the memory.

 

[MaDDaWg1018]

hmmm....and im looking @ some of the 9500 benchmark scores on futuremark.com, and theyre significantly higher than the ones for the 9600 and 9700's...whys that??

**sorry for all the questions, just want to know what i should get for sure. =)

 

[Czar]

Originally posted by: MaDDaWg1018
hmmm....and im looking @ some of the 9500 benchmark scores on futuremark.com, and theyre significantly higher than the ones for the 9600 and 9700's...whys that??

**sorry for all the questions, just want to know what i should get for sure. =)

probably overclocked to beat the 9700, but the 9500 is faster than the 9600 but the 9600 overclocks like crazy, but the 9500 can be softmodded into a 9700 non pro

 

[GTaudiophile]

It's official:

The company recently signed a deal allowing ATI to distribute Half-Life 2 with its Radeon cards...

 

[GTaudiophile]

HardOCP's Kyle makes a good point in his HL2 preview:

It seems to be truly sad that special code paths are having to be implemented by game developers for their games to run "correctly" on NVIDIA hardware. Standards and DX9 were supposed to be about speeding up development processes, not slowing it down.

 

[andreasl]

Originally posted by: GTaudiophile
It's official:

The company recently signed a deal allowing ATI to distribute Half-Life 2 with its Radeon cards...

Well it was also mentioned at THG. They also denied that ATI paid them to make Nvidia cards look bad. One thing all these sites have in common so far is that they based their articles on the press material provided by Valve (and perhaps ATI??). We have yet to see any independant benchmarks. It will also be interesting to see what the new 50.xx Detonator drivers will do for this.

I hope this game allows people to record their own timedemos, otherwise it's very likely that the drivers will be optimized for the standard timedemos....

 

[hungrygoose]

everyone here just about seems to put alot of stock into these benchmarks....i wonder.....what is the image quality on the radeon?....i mean, sure the fps are there, but fps is not everything......nobody seems to care about image quality when it comes to which card manufacturer is getting presently romped by the other......i'm not sayin nvidia's image quality is better, i'm just saying that just b/c the radeon got better fps doesn't mean that it is kickin nvidia's ass or anything like that......i don't know.......i just don't put much stock in fps benchmarks....i'd rather make my decisions based on my experience.....i'll wait and see how hl2 runs on my ti4200, THEN and only then will i make a decision on upgrading

 

[NFS4]

Originally posted by: hungrygoose
everyone here just about seems to put alot of stock into these benchmarks....i wonder.....what is the image quality on the radeon?....i mean, sure the fps are there, but fps is not everything......nobody seems to care about image quality when it comes to which card manufacturer is getting presently romped by the other......i'm not sayin nvidia's image quality is better, i'm just saying that just b/c the radeon got better fps doesn't mean that it is kickin nvidia's ass or anything like that......i don't know.......i just don't put much stock in fps benchmarks....i'd rather make my decisions based on my experience.....i'll wait and see how hl2 runs on my ti4200, THEN and only then will i make a decision on upgrading

It's common knowledge that the Radeon in general has better image quality than the GeForce family

 

[Regs]

Ok I heard Doom 3 will run better on Nvidia but I did not hear it will run crippled on ATI hardware like half-life w/ Nvidia hardware.

Their is no conspiracy. ATI just has better hardware. When ATi took over x-box GPU's it should of proved more of the point. This is coming from a former nVidia user.

I would also be damn happy with 60 FPS @ 1024/768 . Hell, I get 60-80 FPS in ut2003k with 4x/8x with 8 other bots.

 

[Vonkhan]

Brandon ... when's Anand gonna put up more info ???

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

Its tommorow already, I haven't slept all night doing homework ... this is the only thing keeping me awake!

 

[NFS4]

Originally posted by: Vonkhan
Brandon ... when's Anand gonna put up more info ???

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

Its tommorow already, I haven't slept all night doing homework ... this is the only thing keeping me awake!

Look at Adul's post about 10 up

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: Vonkhan
Brandon ... when's Anand gonna put up more info ???

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

Its tommorow already, I haven't slept all night doing homework ... this is the only thing keeping me awake!

Got to wait until midnight, Thursday night/Friday morning.

 

[Czar]

since I'm in a different time zone, how many hours since the article?

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: Czar
since I'm in a different time zone, how many hours since the article?

Approx. 15 hours, 26 minutes.

 

[Nemesis77]

It seems that 3DMark03 was right after all.

 

[thatsright]

You know what, I'm not really even sure if I will buy this game. I mean once you get past the 'Geee Whizz' eye candy, what about the story, or game?

BTW, I saw the FPS scores for the various Nvidia/ATI card and I wonder where will my Power Color 9700 NON-Pro will stack up in here? I just built a new rig, a IC7/3Ghz P4/1GB Ram/Audigy2 etc. What's your opinon on how my card would fare?

 

[Aftermath]

So how much has Valve done to please its NVIDIA-based video-card-owning customers? It has spent 5 times the amount of time optimizing the NV3X path as they have the DX9 path. Valve themselves were alarmed at the performance difference and went further to say that ATI did not need such specific optimizations performed.

The easy thing for Valve to do ( and to save lots of time ) is to treat NV3X as DX8 hardware, meaning it's up to us gamers to turn on DX9 for the game ourselves. Also, by doing so, if we had DX8 running with GeForce FX 5200/5600, we will get playable framerates. Another downside of having the mixed mode equivalent ( 2 different optimizations ) for any single title will mean that future developers using this engine will have to tailor their code to both paths, which means more budget required, which some studios do not have.

- Firingsquad

Bravo nVidia, bravo.

 

[GTaudiophile]

Originally posted by: thatsright
You know what, I'm not really even sure if I will buy this game. I mean once you get past the 'Geee Whizz' eye candy, what about the story, or game?

BTW, I saw the FPS scores for the various Nvidia/ATI card and I wonder where will my Power Color 9700 NON-Pro will stack up in here? I just built a new rig, a IC7/3Ghz P4/1GB Ram/Audigy2 etc. What's your opinon on how my card would fare?

LOL. HL1 was ALL about the story and AI. Even if HL2 is just HL1 + new eye candy, I'm sold. HL1 was such an adventure, like being part of a movie or something. I think the peeps at Valve know that the story is important...

 

[Regs]

Originally posted by: thatsright
You know what, I'm not really even sure if I will buy this game. I mean once you get past the 'Geee Whizz' eye candy, what about the story, or game?

BTW, I saw the FPS scores for the various Nvidia/ATI card and I wonder where will my Power Color 9700 NON-Pro will stack up in here? I just built a new rig, a IC7/3Ghz P4/1GB Ram/Audigy2 etc. What's your opinon on how my card would fare?

After the 'Geee Whizz' graphics, you have the active environments along side the most interactive first person shooter engine's ever created. Read the previews, much to learn. And we are not just talking new graphics, we are talking new aged graphics. Where the graphics actually play more than a role of cosmetics, but the diversity, interactivity, and atmosphere of the game.

Your card will be fare...

 

[Shagga]

D@mn. Need a card that will do 60FPS at 1280 x 1024 so that it looks good on my LCD 17". Don't want to go back to 1024 x 768 Should HL2 be released at the end of this month I'm going to jump ship from nVidia to ATI as I don't believe I can wait for the nV40 or R460 or whatever its called! :frown:

[edit]

OMG, I'm a Doom fan also, what do I get....decisions decisions....this is actually quite a dilemma.

 

[Nemesis77]

And as to the claims that "these results are not reliable because Valve is in bed with Ati!": Have you ever considered that they might be working with Ati since their game works the best with Ati? They don't have to waste any time "optimizing" for Ati hardware, it just works.

 

[Dean]

I cannot help but to believe something must have went wrong in the developement of the FX hardware. Here you have a GPU with 120+million transistors, huge clock rate and huge amount of memory bandwidth. As soon as you throw some real math at it, it goes belly up. When seeing a lowly 9600pro beat it tells me it has to be more than shader speed and makes me think that the core is not entirely functional. What in the he11 are all those transistors being used for?

Its not just DX9 either. The 5900ultra running in DX8 mode is still slower than the 9800pro running in DX9 mode.

 

[deadlock]

After the 'Geee Whizz' graphics, you have the active environments along side the most interactive first person shooter engine's ever created. Read the previews, much to learn. And we are not just talking new graphics, we are talking new aged graphics. Where the graphics actually play more than a role of cosmetics, but the diversity, interactivity, and atmosphere of the game.

Ditto - it really has to be seen to be believed.

I don't know if it's been mentioned here before, but Fileplanet are hosting an exclusive half-hour long QuickTime movie with commentary of some demo levels in HL2 and some actual gameplay. It's A-W-E-S-O-M-E - all the textures and objects in the game are fully interactive and have physics engines consistent with their real-world counterparts - the last time I've been so blown away by a game was with the release of the original Quake. If you can stomach the 600MB download, give it a look:

http://www.fileplanet.com/files/120000/123983.shtml