Not many of you can have missed that ATi really whipped nVidia’s ass in yesterday’s tests of Half-Life 2. According to nVidia, we find the answer for the crappy performance of the cards in the fact that Valve used Detonator 45 and not Detonator 50 (which Valve also has access to).
“We’re confused as to why Valve chose to use Release. 45 (Rel. 45) – because up to two weeks prior to the Shader Day we had been working closely with Valve to ensure that Release 50 (Rel. 50) provides the best experience possible on NVIDIA hardware.”
However, Valve has already explained why it didn’t use Detonator 50 and the reason for that is simply that the driver includes too many optimizations, of which Valve is sceptical to. You can read about many of them in the news piece Mean optimizations.
Read the entire message from nVidia here.
