Wow. Anand just thrashed Nvidia

AnomalousEntity

AnomalousEntity

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Breaking News: Halflife 2 Performance Revealed




video



Date: September 10th, 2003
Topic: Video Card
Manfacturer: None
Author: Anand Lal Shimpi




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.

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Tell me about it! I only finished building this one in March and I feel like it's almost obsolete already! :eek:
 
The minimum system specs are currently targeted at a 700 MHz PC with 128 MB RAM and a DX6-level video card TNT2 etc, meaning you won't need a supercomputer to run Half-Life 2.

But on the machine above don't expect to see reflective water,dynamic shadows and bump-mapped textures. The game running at maximum detail 50/60 fps, machine required for this is approx 1600Mhz cpu, 256 mb ram, GeForce4 Ti card.

In real life you need the best from a new game so I would recommend a 2000 cpu, 512 mb ram, GeForce4 Ti4800 128 ddr or ATI Radeon equivalent.
The more power the better but not essential with this game.
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So the above system requirements are no longer valid?
 
Scn64 said:
So the above system requirements are no longer valid?
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You can play in DX 8 mode. The Geforce 4s fare almost as good as the Geforce Fxs in dx8, and neither are worth a crap in Dx9 mode unless you have the 5900 Ultra running in the special mode valve wrote to obtain descent framerates (or what I refer too as "tard mode")
 
AnomalousEntity said:
You can play in DX 8 mode. The Geforce 4s fare almost as good as the Geforce Fxs in dx8, and neither are worth a crap in Dx9 mode unless you have the 5900 Ultra running in the special mode valve wrote to obtain descent framerates (or what I refer too as "tard mode")
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I have Directx 9 on my computer so would I still be able to play in Directx 8 mode?
 
Scn64 said:
I have Directx 9 on my computer so would I still be able to play in Directx 8 mode?
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Sure its backwards compatible. Im assuming what they mean by "dx 8 mode" is going to be a setting you pick (or it will most probably be set by default after video card detection) in the In game settings menu.
 
Points and laughs at all those Nvidia peeps* :rofl4: I'll play it on my Geforce 3 just for pisses when i get it :D Gonna let me 9800pro do the main job though ;)
 
I'm waiting a bit before buying a new card. The current "best" Nvidia and ATI cards have been out just long enough that I don't want to risk shelling out $400 just to see a better card released a month later.
 
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