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Half-Life 2 Video Stress Test Performance August 19, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Wondering how today's high-end video cards will perform with Half-Life 2? In today's article, we've rounded up all of NVIDIA and ATI's high-end DirectX 9 video cards. ATI cards included range from the RADEON 9700 PRO to the X800 XT Platinum Edition, with RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB versus 9800 PRO 128MB benchmarks tested as well. All of NVIDIA's high-end offerings are included as well, including the GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce FX 5900/5950 Ultra, and of course the GeForce 6800, 6800 GT, and 6800 Ultra. Find out who comes out on top, as well as if NVIDIA has improved their GeForce FX performance inside!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 9 ) |
Besides DOOM 3, 2004’s other highly anticipated shooter is without a doubt Valve’s Half-Life 2. Late yesterday Valve released the beta version of Counter-Strike:Source and a video stress test for Half-Life 2, providing a glimpse of how today’s hardware will run with Half-Life 2’s source engine. Keep in mind that the video stress test probably shouldn’t be considered the definitive “Half-Life 2 benchmark”, as this isn’t the final game. In fact, if you recall our Half-Life 2 performance articles from last year, the video stress test is somewhat similar to the “techdemo” benchmark demo from that article. And since CS: Source is still in beta, benchmarks from it should probably be considered as a preview of things to come as well. But that didn’t stop us from testing!
We’ve decided to split our test results into two categories: one for the video stress test and a second group for the beta of Counter-Strike: Source. We’re starting off with the video stress test first to bring you as much information as quickly as possible; then we’ll report on performance with Counter-Strike: Source beta. Let’s get started!
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The video stress test
As we just mentioned, Valve’s video stress test is partially taken from the techdemo we used at ATI’s Shader Day event in Seattle. The demo splices together portions of Valve’s E3 2003 presentation such as the scene with the Predator character in front of the flames. Bump maps are practically everywhere, the walls of the caves are filled with them. Valve’s pixel shaded water is also used extensively in the video stress test. Like Valve’s original techdemo, the demo from the stress test is mainly meant to demonstrate the incredible effects that the engine is capable of, not real gameplay.
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Because of this, it's best to think of the video stress test more like a synthetic benchmark, ala 3DMark 03, rather than an indicator of performance in Half-Life 2, much like Unreal Tournament 2003’s flyby tests were back in the days. We’ve provided a few screenshots, but keep in mind that we weren’t able to use the benchmarking functionality that we had last year, where we could see our performance on a frame-by-frame basis, as well as capture screenshots from any frame in the demo used for benchmarking.
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For our testing with the video stress test, all tests were run three times at a given resolution, with the highest score kept and the rest discarded. We turned up the detail settings to their maximums on the high-end cards, this means that model, texture, and shadow detail were all set to high, while water detail was set to reflect all objects. We should also mention that we noticed visual artifacts on both ATI and NVIDIA cards after extended use. Much like John Carmack mentioned that DOOM 3 pushes previously unused portions of hardware, the same may be the case for Half-Life 2. Also keep in mind that we’re dealing with beta software.
In addition, although it “appears” you can run 6xAA on NVIDIA cards, this is definitely not the case. Valve should probably consider taking this setting out when a GeForce card is detected.
| Testing the GeForce FX | Page:: ( 2 / 9 ) |
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.
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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.
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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.
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| System setup | Page:: ( 3 / 9 ) |
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
ASUS K8V Deluxe
1GB OCZ PC3200 EL Platinum Rev2
ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI RADEON X800 PRO
ATI RADEON 9800 XT
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB
ATI RADEON 9700 PRO
CATALYST 4.8
ASUS V9950 GeForce FX 5900 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900 XT
Leadtek WinFast A400 GeForce 6800
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card
PNY Verto GeForce 6800 GT
ForceWare 61.77
DirectX 9.0c
Windows XP with Service Pack 1
60GB Western Digital Special Edition with 8MB cache
Benchmarks
Half-Life 2 Video stress test
| Half-Life 2 High-end cards | Page:: ( 4 / 9 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| Half-Life 2 High-end cards Max settings | Page:: ( 5 / 9 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
Notes
Editor's Note:We originally posted page5.asp incorrectly, the AA scores with the X800 graphs were mixed up. We've since corrected that, and included head-to-head comparisons.
| Half-Life 2 Gen2 DX9 High-end cards | Page:: ( 6 / 9 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| Half-Life 2 Gen2 4xAA | Page:: ( 7 / 9 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| Half-Life 2 Gen2 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 9 ) |
Half-Life 2 VST – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 9 / 9 ) |
ATI’s X800 cards clearly come out ahead in Valve’s video stress test, as do the RADEON 9800’s over GeForce FX. Valve has been saying this would be the case for some time now and today we have that confirmation. We'll soon be able to take benchmarks from Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source using custom demos to re-affirm this.
Most surprising is how well older cards did, particularly those from ATI. Those who invested in 9700 and 9800 series cards a year ago for the original expected release date of Half-Life 2 should be quite pleased, the stress test runs excellently on them. Valve has also apparently managed to improve NV3X performance significantly, as the GeForce FX cards do quite well compared to what we were led to expect a year ago, despite the fact that they’re still running in DX8.1 mode.
While the Half-Life 2 delay has irked some gamers, we're glad to see Valve has taken full advantage of it with optimizations.
If these benchmarks are any indication, the Source engine is not just powerful, but efficient. We should however note that there were many cases where the cards we tested didn't run properly with the video stress test. We mentioned the artificating in the intro, but some settings simply refused to run with the stress test, either with a driver error message (in the case of the X800 XT PE) or with the system repeatedly rebooting itself (in the case of the 9700 PRO, which we feel was a heat-related issue). We're now eager to see how the cards run with Counter-Strike: Source beta itself, and ultimately, the final release of both CS: Source and Half-Life 2.