Testing the GeForce FX

In order to appeal to the widest demographic possible, with Half-Life 2 Valve has implemented multiple rendering modes. If you have a high-end DirectX 9 card, Half-Life 2 will run the DX9 codepath, whereas if you’re playing with an older DirectX 8 card like NVIDIA’s popular GeForce4 Ti or RADEON 8500, Half-Life 2 will auto-detect your card and run the DX8 codepath.

RADEON 9800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 4xAA/8xAF

This makes setting the game up a snap, as you shouldn’t have to mess around with detail settings too much to get good performance with Half-Life 2. One of the controversial topics that arose from this however was that all high-end GeForce FX 5900 series cards run in DirectX 8.1 mode, even though they’re technically DirectX 9 cards. Valve’s argument was that running the default DX9 codepath, GeForce FX cards ran abysmally slow, the game literally turned into a slideshow.

Rather than drag users through this, when a GeForce FX card was detected, Half-Life 2 defaulted to the DX8 path. NVIDIA argued that future drivers would improve the situation considerably, and that they’d only begun optimizing for Half-Life 2: with a little more work, their optimizations could play a big role in boosting their performance.

RADEON 9800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 4xAA/8xAF

Unfortunately for GeForce FX users, we have to report that with the latest build of Half-Life 2, your hardware still defaults to DirectX 8.1 mode. Fortunately, Half-Life 2’s DX8.1 path still looks beautiful, casual gamers would probably be hard-pressed to see any differences at a glance. But you will miss out on the high dynamic range lighting Half-Life 2 boasts.

RADEON 9800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 4xAA/8xAF

We couldn’t determine how to force RADEON 9800/9700 cards to run in DX8 mode, nor could we force GeForce FX into DX9 mode, so we had to stick with the defaults (GeForce 6800 is running in DX9 mode). Therefore, GeForce FX/RADEON 9800 numbers aren’t an apples to apples comparison. We also decided to set water detail to “world only”, rather than “reflect all”. Once again we’ve provided some screenshots:


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RADEON 9800 XT 4xAA/8xAF

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra 4xAA/8xAF