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Don't know if anybody else has heard of this, but Valve released its internal benchmark for Half Life 2. Apparently ATI cards beat the stuffings of the GeForce cards. Even a Radeon 9600 Pro beats the GeForce 5900 Ultra. This is HL2 ran at 1024x768 without AA and AF, and the GeForce cards are getting below 20fps.

The interesting thing is that Valve said that the GeForce FXs are really DirectX 8.1 cards in DirectX 9 clothing. Apparently Valve spent five times optimizing the game to run on Nvidia cards than they did on ATI cards. In the end, Valve had to come up with a special mixed mode of DirectX8 and 9 in order to get playable frames on GeForce cards. Hell, when Valve did benchmarking with GeForce cards on DirectX8 only, even the Ti4800 is performing comparably with the 5900 Ultra.

Of course, this is not indepedent benchmarking. But I am hyped up because I own a Radeon 9700 Pro and I have been looking forward to Half Life 2 ever since Gordon Freeman jumped into the portal.

This has fanboys on both sides talking loudly. Nvidia fanboys trying to defend the GeForces while ATI fanboys jeer at Nvidia. I am not a fanboy of either company, but if the benchmarks are any indication, it's a good time to be an ATI owner, especially with steady improving driver releases.

SO, any thoughts and comments on the story?

I have experienced some lagging in some games since I had to install DX9 for Spilter Cell and am running a nVidia GPU Geforce 4 TI <something>.

I've as of yet been unable to find the reason for why my computer seems to lag in some games (P4 2.4 512 RAM and all that), but when I read this yesteday, it hit me that it could very well be the chipset combined with DX9 wich is causing my "problems" (rather annoyances).

So unfortunally I think it could very well be true that nVidia has been licked by ATI But we will have to see what happens next, but if it is true that the latest nVidia cards aren't all that great with DX9 it could very well mean a big loss for them and a big gain for ATI.
It would requiere a new chipset for nVidia to "win back trust".

As for the fact that this benchmarking was sponsered by ATI is only mildly disturbing. Because if the result had been something ATI couldn't use to much, they would simply not have published it as they have done now. I see no reason why ATI would try to lie by discreding nVidia withouth something hold it in.
So basically this is bad news for us nVidia owners at the moment, bad news for the nVidia company (stand to loose potential customers) but good news for ATI and ATI owners....
but also good news for the "battle between GPUs" because nVidia will not roll over and get pounded on I'm sure.

As for being a fanboy? no way - I buy what is cost-effective. I don't care much about wether it is asus, intel, nVidia or what (although am running brandnames in my current set up )

nVidia strikes back.

Seems that nVidia is replying to it now - haven't had the time to read it completely myself yet....

http://gear.ign.com/articles/437/437776 ... ?fromint=1

I guess if I were a Nvidia owner who owns the laste GeForce FXs, I'd be pissed right now. I mean, I spent 500 dollars buying the 5900 Ultra and it's being beat by a card that's 300 dollars cheaper. I think Valve is scared by the potential backlash from its Nvidia base. HL2 is possibly the biggest release of this year, and if the majority of Nvidia owners find that it runs like crap on their cards, they'll probably lash out Valve for not enough optimization or accuse Valve of sleeping with ATI.

That, I believe, it's the reason why Valve released the benchmark, to act as a disclaimer, saying that it's not responsible for the underwhelming performance on Nvidia cards.

Finally, some indepedent benchmarking being released at Anandtech. Here's the link:

Half Life 2 Benchmarks

Yup, this confirms Valve's internal benchmarking to a very large extent. As for Nvidia's comments, I find it strange that Nvidia's PR would say that Valve hasn't made them aware of the problem. How could that be when Valve has spent 5x times optimizing Nvidia cards than they did ATI cards?

The conclusion of the article says something that I believe is correct: that the future of gaming is no longer going to be about blazing framerates but about image quality and stability. It looks like DirectX 9 will change the way video cards are designed. The unfortunate thing that might happen is that game developers will stick with DirectX 8 to compensate for Nvidia cards, since Nvidia does own the majority of the market share.