“The cat is out the bag”. Valve has released benchmark results for nVidia’s cards running Half-Life 2, and things are looking rather bad for nVidia. Even in the special nVidia mode where quality (precision) has been lowered quite a bit, the 5900 Ultra is defeated by ATi’s older Radeon 9800 Pro. According to Valve, nVidia has already been at it again and optimized its drivers to e.g. not render smoke/fog in the game. The question is whether these kinds of optimizations is what we users want to make our 500$ graphics cards deliver sensible performance.
What makes it all almost comical is that Valve has spent almost five times as much time on optimizing the 3D engine for nVidia compared to the generic optimizations (for other DirectX9 cards, among them Radeon 9×00). So I don’t think anyone can accuse Valve for not trying to solve the problems.
A nice detail for you with older Radeon cards (Radeon 8500-9200) is that some effects in the game can use the Pixel Shader 1.4 functions these cards offer (something that GeForce 3-4 don’t).
On the first of October, we’ll have more information.
Read more here.
