Anandtech has some good info for ATI owners on Half Life 2 performance

[YeOldeStonecat]

Look for a good article tomorrow, but here's a teaser:

"You'll see my own numbers tomorrow night at midnight, but we've been given the go ahead to reveal a bit of information about Half-Life 2. I'll keep it brief and to the point and will explain it in greater detail tomorrow night:

- Valve is pissed at all of the benchmarking "optimizations" they've seen in the hardware community;
- Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;
- Valve recommends running geforce fx 5200 and 5600 cards in dx8 mode in order to get playable frame rates.
- even with the special NV3x codepath, ATI is the clear performance leader under Half-Life 2 with the Radeon 9800 Pro hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The 5900 ultra is noticeably slower with the special codepath and is horrendously slower under the default dx9 codepath;
- the Radeon 9600 Pro performs very well - it is a good competitor of the 5900 ultra;
- ATI didn't need these special optimizations to perform well and Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.

There you have it folks, there's much more coming tomorrow."

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1862

[Brent]

wow

it is also cool to note that Valve listened to our wants in features we wanted to see in games to make benchmarking better in real games

http://hardocp.com/files/BenchmarkingFuture.pdf

[zooner]

Originally posted by YeOldeStonecat
Look for a good article tomorrow, but here's a teaser:


- the Radeon 9600 Pro performs very well - it is a good competitor of the 5900 ultra;
- ATI didn't need these special optimizations to perform well and Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.

There you have it folks, there's much more coming tomorrow."

http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1862

hot damn.

knew I made a decent decision with the 9600pro.

thanks!

[Cypher]

Awesome news. I just bought a 9800p too.

[Immortal]

Lovely! I bet my 9500 pro will be in good use!

[Ghosthunter]

I got my 9800 pro


now when is it coming out already? i cannot wait anymore lol

[YeOldeStonecat]

Originally posted by Ghosthunter
I got my 9800 pro


now when is it coming out already? i cannot wait anymore lol

You should see it just before Thanksgiving...a popular target date for retailers to have something on store shelves for the busiest shopping day of the year (Sat after Thanksgiving...X-Mas rush)

[Daves World]

I'm just lovin my 9600 Pro more and more everyday..............

[YeOldeStonecat]

Originally posted by Dave's World
I'm just lovin my 9600 Pro more and more everyday..............

What up Holmes? Haven't seen ya in like two days, guess we've both been out of the office a lot. LOL.

[Daves World]

been doing lots of onsites lately, should be in the shop all day Friday, have to build an old PII 400mhz Gateway from scratch for a customer. Great job for a friday.....you ?