**Half Life 2 screens and videos**

http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life2/screenshots/
http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life2/videos/









That 9600 is a 9600 Pro. I'm sure Nvidia owners will be upset.

"Update 09/06: We also emailed Gabe Newell from Valve Software about his experience with Pixel Shader Performance:

GD: We've started some initial DX9 Shader tests, and have seen, so far that NVIDIA NV3x hardware has a hard time.. Will it'll be similar w/ the HL2 Benchmark?

"Yep."

Gabe Newell


Update 09/05: We emailed id Software guru, John Carmack about his experience with NV3x hardware on Pixel Shading performance, and this was his reply:

GD: John, we've found that NVIDIA hardware seems to come to a crawl whenever Pixel Shader's are involved, namely PS 2.0..

Have you witnessed any of this while testing under the Doom3 environment?

"Yes. NV30 class hardware can run the ARB2 path that uses ARB_fragment_program, but it is very slow, which is why I have a separate NV30 back end that uses NV_fragment_program to specify most of the operations as 12 or 16 bit instead of 32 bit."

John Carmack"

http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/ati_vs_nvidia/dx9_desktop/001.htm


"Newell emphasized that Half-Life 2 has been developed as a DirectX 9 game, and said that it has taken Valve a large amount of additional effort to let Nvidia's range of DX9 cards play the game with DX9 effects enabled. Valve has created a special "mixed mode" option for Nvidia cards that substantially increases framerates for the high-end GeForce 5900 Ultra (from a score of roughly 30fps in the Half-Life 2 benchmark to a score of just under 50fps). However, Nvidia's less expensive cards, the GeForce 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra both post scores of just 10 to 15 frames per second in the same test. The provided test numbers were from a system equipped with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor.

In comparison with the high-end Nvidia card, the ATI Radeon 9600 and 9800 Pro perform much better in the Half-Life 2 test's "full precision" mode. According to Newell's presentation, the GeForce 5900 Ultra scores 30fps in this test, whereas the Radeon 9600 Pro scores 48fps and the Radeon 9800 Pro scores just over 60fps.

The mainstream Nvidia cards post higher numbers when running in DirectX 8 mode, though it's yet unclear as to how this affects the game's visual quality. Scores for both the 5200 Ultra and 5600 Ultra are about 10fps higher in DX8 than DX9. This indicates that the more affordable cards in Nvidia's lineup have to be run in DirectX 8 mode to achieve playable performance of over 20 frames per second.

We'll post more details based on running our own tests with the Half-Life 2 benchmark soon, which should shed more light on how the cards perform at different resolutions and settings."


Running in DX8 settings makes a drastic difference:







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