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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klah - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
"cant wait for CPU benches"Check out these:
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/half_life_2_cp...
KevinCQU - Saturday, November 20, 2004 - link
#17, I'm running the game on a regular GF3, AXP2500+ @2.2 and 512 ram. It runs smoothly at directx8 settings, I turned down the water quality though, havent tried turning it up yet, been busy playing the game ;) I'm impressed though....its definitely playable at 1024 and it looks pretty nice too-Kevin
ksherman - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#17, im probably gonna try and run the game (GF2 TI200, but OCed to Ti400 speeds ;), so ill let you know if itll work...ksherman - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
dumbish question--> i i wanna play in DX7 or 8 mode, do i need to install different driers, or do i just use the ingmae settings? I dont actually own the game yet, so thats why i ask...kmmatney - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I can't believe how much better DirectX looks compared to OpenGL. Seems like Id made the wrong choice...GonzoDaGr8 - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
Aaargh..Has anyone ran this game yet on a Geforce3(regular/Ti200/Ti500) based card yet? I'm curious as I have a Ti200 and could run this is DX8 mode..skiboysteve - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#13 is exactly rightits not all OpenGL vs DX or nvidia optimization to ati optimization.
look back at anands article about the graphics pipeline on each of these cards. Doom3 was extremly texture intensive, doing allot of lookup to tables instead of doing the math.
nv30 and nv40 are very good at doing texture look ups, and only the nv40 is good at the math. nv30 had a very non math friendly pipeline.
the r300-r400 were better at math.
its all in the articles on this very website.
bupkus - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
I have a Ti4200 w/ 64MB ram and I changed from 1024x768 to 800x600 to fix some occasional stutter problems; it didn't help.Which res should I probably be able to run in. I have a 2500+ Barton OC'd to 2.2GHz with 2x256 OCZ PC3500 EL.
Just for fun, I went to 1280x1024 for my LCD just to see how it would look (without movement) and it was very nice.
skunkbuster - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
also, nvidia is known to be better at openGl games and weaker in games that use dx.the same as ati is known to be better at dx games, and weaker in openGl games.
doom3= open gl
Falloutboy - Friday, November 19, 2004 - link
#10 its because Doom 3 was very texture intensive based, which the 5xxx series of nvidia exceled at and HL2 is a very shader intensive engine wit hless emphasis on texutures, and as we all know by now the 5xxx series sucked in DX9 shaders