Half Life 2 benchmarks: ATI vs. nVidia

Here's an article from Gamers Depot comparing the performance of the ATI cards vs. nVidia running HL2.

It seems like nVidia has a lot of homework to do...

 

here's some more info
http://www.tech-report.com/etc/2003q3/valve/index.x?pg=1

 

yeah, that's him alright.. he put on some burger didn't he?

 

Wow, I guess I shouldn't even think about running HL2 on my MSI Ti4200 128mb card

 

Well, I think the idea is that HL2 is scalable. I believe they were running it at high details in order to push the cards they were testing. You can see the jump in performance on the nVida cards between using DX9 stuff and DX8.

 

I'm leaning toward ATI paying off Valve. Not much doubt that ATI can and has outperformed Nvidia, but having the benchmarks off by that much, it has to be a tad biased.

 

I'm willing to wager ATI has simply invested more into making their most recent drivers and hardware more compatible with DX9.

What does ATI produce? Video cards (focused on gaming and performance) and TV cards.
What does nVidia produce? Vid cards, mobo chipsets, Xbox , and now audio solutions.

nVidia has recently been focusing on knocking VIA out of the chipset market rather than pushing next-gen video cards. In effect, they're choosing to be second place in performace (gaming) gfx order to dominate the AMD chipset and low-end gfx market.

 

I spent may hours reading on this.
It seems ATI did their homework and put in plenty of 32 bit buffer space. This means slower GPU speeds but more throughput when the textures get big.
DX9 allows for big textures and uses GPU power extensivly to free up the memory bus which was such a bottleneck in DX8.
nVidia made a compromise card in that it runs DX8 very fast, but DX9 a tad slower as they use two 16 bit buffers to form a 32 bit buffer. They wind up short in HL2 and will wind up short more and more as games are programmed to take full advantage of DX9.

Does this matter?
Not to most of the high end users, we will all have new cards before HL2 or Doom III arrive anyway.

Hopefully I can draw fire from those who know more than me and clarify what little I know abour vid card architecture.

 

There's a follow up article up. Still doesn't look good for nVidia....

 

ok first off, some will agree, this stupid "taking sides" is getting old.. i'm sick of hearing how companies go for one side be it Athlon, Pentium, or ATI, NVIDIA. we would get better software if they would work with both sides equally. and why don't they just run a benchmark with the 50 series drivers? isn't the benchmarks really just for sh!ts and giggles anyhow? the way Nvidia talks (toms hardware) the 45.23 driver wasn't intended to run Half life 2, but the 50's series was what they were planning on having out for it. I got one question, is ATI going to be releasing a new driver before the game releases also? I don't know, hopefully they resolve the issue and both companies products work fine running the game. BTW did anyone look at the comparison screen shots of directx 8, 8.1, and 9. may sound weird but i like the looks of 8.1 overall.

 

Couldn't care less, as long as I can run it and as long as they take out that most annoying prerequisite that one has to be connected to Steam whilst playing on a LAN (LANparties are usually OFFline.. *sigh*) or even Single-Player, I will NOT buy the damn game.

 

OK, well the Beta Detonator 50s are out and they did exactly what was predicted. They lowered the quality to make up for the speed...

Man, I don't know what nVidia is thinking. I used to swear by them

:LINK:

 

how do they get the exact same postion screenshots??? i'm just having a hard time believeing One website. especially one whom seems bias in my opinion. i'm going to do a few test of my own. Best thing Everyone could do is Wait for the final game product and final drivers are released.

edit: did some research on the so called Beta driver. basically the way it goes it was released to some hard and software firm just for testing purposes. Some of the release notes for this driver that were floating around the net are fake and have nothing to offer current nVidia card based owners. some of the mirrors (m3dzone) are halting the link. their words

"we decided to pull down the Detonator 51.75 driver because this driver is not ready to go and is absolutely not ready to be installed on any machine yet."

so in other words chalk one up for gamers depot in making theirselves look more like ATI cheerleaders.

 

You know, SuperNova, I was thinking the same thing. I've been visiting GD for a while now, though, and never seen them to be biased in any way. I dunno if it's one author that has had a bad nVidia experience or what. I hope this isn't the case.

As far as the beta drivers, nVidia is scrambling to get people to take them down because they are just that, beta drivers. Although beta drivers have been leaked to the web before with no commotion.

My opinion is that nVidia is trying hard to figure out how to speed up their drivers and it seems that technology-wise, they are at the moment behind ATI. These drivers were possibly a test to see different methods of increasing FPS, but definitely not something you'd want the public to see.

nVidia fudged the 3dMark test when they were behind, just as ATI fudged QuakeIII when they were behind (quackII anyone?). I guess the new benchmark of who is truly ahead in the technology race is who is cheat3ing the least with their drivers...