Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 1 - DirectX 9 Shootout
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 17, 2004 11:22 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
When Valve and ATI came together to show us the first inklings of Half Life 2 performance last year, it did not look pretty for NVIDIA. NVIDIA’s highest end card at the time, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, could not even outperform a Radeon 9600 Pro in most tests – much less anything from ATI at its price point. Even though we haven’t shown it here (that’s coming in Part II), the situation has not changed for NVIDIA’s NV3x line of GPUs – they still must be treated as DirectX 8 hardware, otherwise they suffer extreme performance penalties when running Half Life 2 using the DirectX 9 codepath. To give you a little preview of what is to come, in DirectX 9 mode, the GeForce 5900 Ultra offers about 1/3 of the performance of the slowest card in this test. If you’re unfortunate enough to have purchased a NV3x based graphics card, you’re out of luck with running Half Life 2 using the DX9 codepath (at any reasonable frame rates).
What we were missing from looking at Half Life 2 performance a year ago was the release of NVIDIA’s NV4x line of GPUs, which have effectively “saved” NVIDIA from delivering embarrassing performance under Half Life 2. In fact, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 line of GPUs actually runs Half Life 2 extremely well, even when pitted up against equivalently priced competition from ATI.
Our final Head to Head comparisons revealed a few interesting things:
The GeForce 6800 Ultra performs very similarly to the X800 XT as long as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are disabled. With those two features enabled, the X800 XT begins to show a performance advantage that is truly seen at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA enabled. If you are running with AA disabled, the two GPUs perform very similar to each other. It is only at 1600 x 1200 that the performance becomes somewhat noticeable between the two, as the X800 XT averaged 8% faster than the 6800 Ultra. However, turning on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering gave the X800 XT between a 4 – 20% advantage depending on resolution, which definitely isn’t shabby.
At the $400 price point, the X800 Pro and the GeForce 6800GT are basically equal performers in all of the resolutions we tested (regardless of whether or not AA/aniso was enabled). So the recommendation here goes either way, look at the performance of the cards in some of the other games you play to determine which one is right for you.
If you’re spending $200 - $300 you’ve got three choices for PCI Express graphics cards, and one for AGP. The NVIDIA GeForce 6800 is 12-pipe underclocked version of the 6800GT/Ultra and currently sells for close to $300, however in Half Life 2 the performance of the regular 6800 is not any better than the cheaper 6600GT, thus making our NVIDIA recommendation clear. But how does the 6600GT stack up to the X700 XT? The two GPUs are basically equal performers under Half Life 2, although the X700 XT is faster with AA enabled. If you need an AGP card however, then the 6600GT AGP is your only option (and far from a bad one at that).
We’ve left a number of questions unanswered here today involving older/slower hardware, so be sure to check back for part II of our Half Life GPU comparison to find out how well older hardware performs under Valve’s amazing game. Thanks for taking a break from playing Half Life 2 to read this, now get back to it…
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Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
Thanks for all of the comments guys. Just so you know, I started on Part 2 the minute the first article was done. I'm hoping to be done with testing by sometime tomorrow and then I've just got to write the article. Here's a list of the new cards being tested:9600XT, 9550, 9700, X300, GF 6200, GF 5900XT, GF4 Ti 4600, GF4 MX440
I'm doing both DX9 and DX8 comparisons, including image quality.
After Part 2 I think I'll go ahead and do the CPU comparison, although I've been thinking about doing a more investigative type of article into Half Life 2 performance in trying to figure out where its performance limitations exist, so things may get shuffled around a bit.
We used the PCI Express 6600GT for our tests, but the AGP version should perform quite similarly.
The one issue I'm struggling with right now is the fact that the X700 XT is still not available in retail, while the X700 Pro (256MB) is. If I have the time I may go back and run some X700 Pro numbers to make this a more realistic present-day comparison.
Any other requests?
Take care,
Anand
Cybercat - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
You guys made my day comparing the X700XT, 6800, and 6600GT together. One question though (and I apologize if this was mentioned in the article and I missed it), did you guys use the PCIe or AGP version of the 6600GT?Houdani - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
18: Many users rely on hardware review sites to get a feel for what technology is worth upgrading and when.Most of us have financial contraints which preclude us from upgrading to the best hardware, therefore we are more interested in knowing how the mainstream hardware performs.
You are correct that it would not be an efficient use of resources to have AT repeat the tests on hardware that is two or three generations old ... but sampling the previous generation seems appropriate. Fortunately, that's where part 2 will come in handy.
I expect that part 2 will be sufficient in showing whether or not the previous generation's hardware will be a bottleneck. The results will be invaluable for helping me establish my minimum level of satisfaction for today's applications.
stelleg151 - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
forget what i said in 34.....pio!pio! - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
So how do you softmod a 6800NU to a 6800GT???or unlock the extra stuff....
stelleg151 - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
What drivers were being used here, 4.12 + 67.02??Akira1224 - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
Jedilol I should have seen that one coming!
nastyemu25 - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
i bought a 9600XT because it came boxed with a free coupon for HL2. and now i can't even see how it matches up :(coldpower27 - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
These benchmarks are more in line with what I was predicting, the x800 Pro should be equal to 6800 GT due to similar Pixel Shader fillrate while the X800 XT should have an advantage at higher resolutions due to it's having a higher fillrate being clocked higher.Unlike DriverATIheaven:P.
This is great I am happy knowing Nvidia's current generation of hardware is very competitive in performance in all aspects when at equal amounts of fillrate.
Da3dalus - Wednesday, November 17, 2004 - link
In the 67.02 Forceware driver there's a new option called "Negative LOD bias", if I understand what I've read correctly it's supposed to reduce shimmering.What was that option set to in the tests? And how did it affect performance, image quality and shimmering?