HL2 Benchmark Politics

EvilHomer3k · Post by **EvilHomer3k** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 12:22 pm

http://games.slashdot.org/games/04/11/1 ... 137&tid=10

Apparently, some sites are actually using the timedemos that ATI made to benchmark cards. I'm sure ATI didn't make those demos slanted towards their cards in any way. No, they wouldn't do that.

So, Valve knowingly misled the public with their release dates to help ATI sell more cards, then, they give ATI advanced access to the game to help them improve performance and let ATI create their own timedemos to distribute. What's next? Deliberately coding games so that one companies cards run the game poorly?

Yet another reason why I trust Anandtech more than any other HW site.

Enough · Post by **Enough** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 1:44 pm

Interesting article. I've never understood why people take their fan boy-ism to such amazing heights. Neither card is likely to be owned by many people given their price tags. I would think most people would be interested in the performance of more affordable cards.

One thing that might partially explain the ATI lead in some tests is the reflection setting picked. The benchmarks that ran reflect all vs. just reflect world tended to favor ATI. But who really cares, both cards do a great job with the game. In the end I conclude that the top end cards are virtually tied (wait until SLI for a clear winner lol), with ATI only having a clear lead on max settings (reflect all) in water levels.

Some screenies that show the difference:

http://www.chaoticdreams.org/ce/jb/ReflectAll.jpg
http://www.chaoticdreams.org/ce/jb/ReflectWorld.jpg

EvilHomer3k · Post by **EvilHomer3k** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 4:45 pm

Anandtech also did a nice article on older cards. Basically, they said that any card, even GeForce 2 and MX cards would play the game pretty well. They just defaulted to a lower quality. One thing of note in the article was that the 5900 class of cards would play very well at DX8.1 settings but not very well at all in DX9. The older ATI cards (9700 and above) played in DX 9 pretty well.

What I don't like about this is that nVidia was denied the same level of access to HL2 as ATI. If that trend continues, it will affect gaming performance in future titles as well as make bug-free drivers less likely. Instead of ATI or nVidia releasing a driver update before or soon after a game comes out, it will take longer because they will have to wait to do intensive testing until they can BUY a copy of the game. If video card chipset makers have to pay for access that was free before, that will also increase the cost of already outrageously priced video cards, too.

Enough · Post by **Enough** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 7:01 pm

EvilHomer3k wrote:What I don't like about this is that nVidia was denied the same level of access to HL2 as ATI. If that trend continues, it will affect gaming performance in future titles as well as make bug-free drivers less likely. Instead of ATI or nVidia releasing a driver update before or soon after a game comes out, it will take longer because they will have to wait to do intensive testing until they can BUY a copy of the game. If video card chipset makers have to pay for access that was free before, that will also increase the cost of already outrageously priced video cards, too.

But both ATI and Nvidia had a similar week early access to the full version of the game, Nvidia dropped the ball and chose to only take advantage of two days with the full game, at least according to a lot of what I have been reading online on this since you posted this link. And one problem with the Anandtech review in terms of gaging video card performance is that many of its benches seem to stress the cpu more than the gpu. Still a good benchmark for folks with an older system, but not exactly how to decide which gpu is the fastest. Irregardless I agree that Anandtech is one of the best hardware sites around. I also like Xbit Labs, speaking of which they have also done a HL2 gpu review here.

I just checked out the Anandtech article on older cards, that is awesome! I wish they would do this sort of thing was more common.

EvilHomer3k · Post by **EvilHomer3k** » Mon Nov 22, 2004 9:56 pm

Doom 3 is pretty good as well. In fact, there's an article in the forums at http://www.3dfxzone.it/enboard/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=1462 on someone getting Doom 3 running pretty well on a Voodoo 2 SLI setup.