Now If We Could Just Get Decent Drivers
AnandTech headline: ATI owners rejoice, HL2 rocks on their hardware…
ATI may still have severe trouble coding decent drivers for their state-of-the-art PC video technology, but for all that, it still works better than nVidia’s last two generations’ worth of competition. The first benchmarks from Valve’s upcoming Half-Life 2 are in, and ATI whips the mother-loving crap out of everything nVidia has tapped out in the last calendar year. Better yet, Valve themselves have revealed that the best performance-for-the-dollar out there belongs to the ATI 9600 Pro (and, by extension, the 9500 Pro, since the cards are very similar).
Of a couple articles making waves today, this piece over at Gamer’s Depot reveals that if you paid over 500 megabucks for your nVidia GeForceFX 5900 Ultra 256 MB, you can now officially begin kicking your own ass. They even offer up some of Valve’s benchmarks to prove it. The Radeon 9800 Pro 128 MB will destroy you with double the framerates. Adding severe insult to this already-mortal injury, this is while the 5900 is running in DirectX 8.1 compatibility mode, a special dumbed-down codepath which Valve found themselves forced to write just for you lucky nVidia owners. Even using this special codepath, the NV3X cards only achieve around 30 FPS at 1024×768. ATI’s 9800 Pro, meanwhile, is running full-bore in pure DirectX 9 and getting 60 FPS at those same settings.
Interestingly, it seems that the best bang-for-the-buck you can get from an nVidia card with HL2 belongs to the GF4 Ti4600!
AnandTech’s companion article paints a similarly grim picture for the nVidia crowd, and hints that much, much more information is going to be posted tomorrow. Looks like it’s gonna be a baaaaaaaad day for nVidia fans.
(Sorry if I was a little harsh. After Catalyst 3.7, I feel the need for some validation.)
Categorized as Games, Games/PC