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This thread has been linked to the game 'Half-Life 2'.
Have a read of this article if your considering getting a new graphics card and want to play Halflife 2.
http://www.megagames.com/news/html (space) /pc/benchmarksrevealbesth-l2card.shtml
We will have to see if the real situation is like this or whether its false advertising.
http://www.megagames.com/news/html (space) /pc/benchmarksrevealbesth-l2card.shtml
We will have to see if the real situation is like this or whether its false advertising.
Page:
lol
Didn't think so, but just wanted to state the facts. ;-)
Didn't think so, but just wanted to state the facts. ;-)
I don't think anyone actually cares that much.
Memorandum! wrote:
> Well it has been plastered all over ATI.com for months that Half-Life
> 2 was ATI optimized...
That is just plain wrong.
Did you not read the link in the original post? HL2 was not optimised for ATI card at all.
All of the Radeon ATI cards in the DX9 range use the default DX9 code path for DX9 effects. When Valve produced HL 2 they stuck to the spec laid out by DX9 for all the effects used in the game. The result - the ATI cards ruin the game very well as both producer stuck to the white paper of DX9
If you read the article in the link you would know that in actually fact Valve spent much more time optimising HL2 for the nVidia cards, because if they hadn't the game would have been unplayable.
Why? Because nVidia in their infinite wisdom decide to break from the DX9 spec when producing the core of the NV3x range - instead of going with the stipulated 24bit floating point precision that DX9 requires, they decide to go for 16bit FP and 32FP! Why, dunno.
But what this means is that if a developer make the game to fit to the DX9 spec, as they should, the game will use 24bit FP precision. But because NV hardware does not natively support this, the nVidia card must run the application in 32bit FP mode.
No while 32bit FP precision goes above and beyond the DX9 spec, and is obviously better than the 24bit FP DX9 requires, the current crop of vid cards (even the 5900 Ultra and 9800Pro) are simply not powerful enough to run with this level of precision - hence the fact that 24bit FP was chosen for DX9 in the first place.
This means that for a GeForce FX card to run at a decent speed, the developer needs to write an alternate code path that uses the 16bit FP path - which is (rather comically) in DX8.1.
This is why Gabe Newel of valve has said in many instanced it is better to treat the NV3.x range as a direct X 8 part - simply because if you put it into DX9 mode it has to run and 32bit FP and it simply isn’t fast enough to do so.
If you did a little reading you would also know that Carmack has found a similar situation while coding Doom 3 - although because he is using OpenGL the FP precision isn't such as issue. But none the less, he has had to write a totally new 'back end' for Doom 3 just for the NV3.x range because again, if he used the default fragmentation path, the nVidia card is less than half the speed of an ATI card. The Radeon range of the other hand have no problem running the game with the normal path because they stuck to the spec.
Guess NV made a biiiiig mistake this time around. Just hope the NV40 gets them back on track as at this stage, ATI are running away with the business. And if there is one thing all consumers need, its competition in the market place, to keep those prices down.
> Well it has been plastered all over ATI.com for months that Half-Life
> 2 was ATI optimized...
That is just plain wrong.
Did you not read the link in the original post? HL2 was not optimised for ATI card at all.
All of the Radeon ATI cards in the DX9 range use the default DX9 code path for DX9 effects. When Valve produced HL 2 they stuck to the spec laid out by DX9 for all the effects used in the game. The result - the ATI cards ruin the game very well as both producer stuck to the white paper of DX9
If you read the article in the link you would know that in actually fact Valve spent much more time optimising HL2 for the nVidia cards, because if they hadn't the game would have been unplayable.
Why? Because nVidia in their infinite wisdom decide to break from the DX9 spec when producing the core of the NV3x range - instead of going with the stipulated 24bit floating point precision that DX9 requires, they decide to go for 16bit FP and 32FP! Why, dunno.
But what this means is that if a developer make the game to fit to the DX9 spec, as they should, the game will use 24bit FP precision. But because NV hardware does not natively support this, the nVidia card must run the application in 32bit FP mode.
No while 32bit FP precision goes above and beyond the DX9 spec, and is obviously better than the 24bit FP DX9 requires, the current crop of vid cards (even the 5900 Ultra and 9800Pro) are simply not powerful enough to run with this level of precision - hence the fact that 24bit FP was chosen for DX9 in the first place.
This means that for a GeForce FX card to run at a decent speed, the developer needs to write an alternate code path that uses the 16bit FP path - which is (rather comically) in DX8.1.
This is why Gabe Newel of valve has said in many instanced it is better to treat the NV3.x range as a direct X 8 part - simply because if you put it into DX9 mode it has to run and 32bit FP and it simply isn’t fast enough to do so.
If you did a little reading you would also know that Carmack has found a similar situation while coding Doom 3 - although because he is using OpenGL the FP precision isn't such as issue. But none the less, he has had to write a totally new 'back end' for Doom 3 just for the NV3.x range because again, if he used the default fragmentation path, the nVidia card is less than half the speed of an ATI card. The Radeon range of the other hand have no problem running the game with the normal path because they stuck to the spec.
Guess NV made a biiiiig mistake this time around. Just hope the NV40 gets them back on track as at this stage, ATI are running away with the business. And if there is one thing all consumers need, its competition in the market place, to keep those prices down.
Interesting. I am planning on building a new PC but I think I'm going to leave it until Doom III and Deus Ex 2 come out, when hopefully there will be some sort of consensus on which card performs the best.
Well it has been plastered all over ATI.com for months that Half-Life 2 was ATI optimized...
Have a read of this article if your considering getting a new graphics card and want to play Halflife 2.
http://www.megagames.com/news/html (space) /pc/benchmarksrevealbesth-l2card.shtml
We will have to see if the real situation is like this or whether its false advertising.
http://www.megagames.com/news/html (space) /pc/benchmarksrevealbesth-l2card.shtml
We will have to see if the real situation is like this or whether its false advertising.
Page: