Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 2 - Mainstream DX8/DX9 Battle
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 19, 2004 6:35 PM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
Valve has done an incredible job with making Half Life 2 playable on just about any graphics platform sold over the last couple of years. While our first guide was more of an upgrade guide telling you what card to upgrade to, Part 2 let us know more about where your graphics card stands today.
We found that as far as DirectX 9 support goes, if you've got a Radeon 9600XT you are in very good shape, the game is quite playable at 1024 x 768 and if you want higher frame rates then 800 x 600 works just fine as well. If you want a low cost upgrade then a GeForce 6600GT AGP would be a good way of smoothing things out at 1280 x 1024. Even owners of the Radeon X300 will find that their performance is relatively decent, albeit at 800 x 600. Slower cards like the Radeon 9550 and the X300SE may be better played in DirectX 8 mode instead.
If you've got a NV3x part your Half Life 2 performance isn't too bad so long as you stay far away from the DX9 codepath; as a DX8 solution, the NV3x GPUs do just fine, there's actually no reason to upgrade unless you want better image quality, since the frame rates they will provide are pretty high to begin with. The same can actually be said about the GeForce4; we found the GeForce4 to run Half Life 2 extremely well in DX8 mode, and the image quality is quite good. Be warned, if you are upgrading from a GeForce4, you are going to want to go for something no slower than the Radeon 9700, otherwise you will get an increase in image quality but a decrease in frame rate.
In the end, we hope these two guides can give you a good idea of how powerful your current graphics card is and what your upgrade path should be if you want higher frame rates or better image quality. The next step is to find out how powerful of a CPU you will need, and that will be the subject of our third installment in our Half Life 2 performance guides. Stay tuned...
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ukDave - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Not that i'm saying that is the reason it performs so badly, it is due to its poor implementation of DX9.0. I think the whole nV 5xxx line needs to be swept under the carpet because i simply can't say anything nice about it :)ukDave - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Doom3 was optimized for nVidia, much like HL2 is for ATi.mattsaccount - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
How can a 5900 be so poor at dx9 style effects in HL2, and excel at an (arguably) more graphically intense game like Doom 3? The difference can't be due only to the AP (Dx vs OGL), can it?ZobarStyl - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Doh login post: FYI the bar graphs on page six are both the DX8 pathway.ZobarStyl - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Cybercat - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Good article. I'm a little disappointed in the 6200's performance though.thebluesgnr - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Hi!Have not read the article yet but I'd like to ask one thing:
The Radeon 9550 tested has 64-bit or 128-bit memory interface? From your numbers I'm sure it's 128-bit, but I think some people might order the cheapest (=64-bit) after reading the article, so it would be nice to see it mentioned.
On the same line, I would like to see AnandTech mention the GPU and memory clocks for all the video cards benchmarks.
btw, the X300SE was tested on a platform with the same processor as the other AGP cards, right?
Thank you.
shabby - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Holy crap my ti4600 can muster 60fps in hl2 ahahaha.skunkbuster - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
yikes! i feel sorry for those people using video cards that only support DX7.Pannenkoek - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I wonder if "playability" is merely based on the average framerates of demos, or that somebody actually tried to play the game with an old card. Counter Strike became barely playable with less than 40 fps later in its life, while average framerates could be "good enough" and while it used to run smoothly at the same framerate in older versions.