We continue with the news about Half-Life 2. I just saw an “interesting” piece of information in Tech Report’s statement concerning nVidia and HL2.
They write the following: (Valve about nVidia’s optimizations.)
“He also mentioned that he’s seen drivers detect screen capture attempts and output higher quality data than what’s actually shown in-game.”
This must truly be a new low-water mark when it comes to optimizations. Personally, I’d rather call it downright cheating.
nVidia, on the other hand, are not so happy about the tests that have been released, and say that they are meaningless since its new Detonator 50 will be optimized for Half-Life 2 and offer much better performance. Valve advise reviewers not to test Half-Life 2 with the present Detonator 50, simply since it lowers the quality too much.
Hopefully, the new nVidia cards coming up soon won’t need this kind of, almost desperate, optimizations we’ve seen recently. But considering that the upcoming cards are just “refreshes”, maybe we shouldn’t have too high expectations. That remains to be seen.
