Date:
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Half Life 2 Benchmarks

Preliminary framerate benchmarks facing off NVIDIA’s and ATI’s latest AGP video cards in Half Life 2 using our own custom made timedemos compared apples to apples.

Introduction:

After a very long wait, what many will call one of the two most anticipated games of this year and last, is finally here. Half Life 2 has finally graced our desktop. Interestingly, while Half Life 2 has been the show pony for ATI, it may also show NVIDIA’s current generation video cards in a very good light. It has been speculated by some that Half Life 2 would perform in a stellar fashion on ATI VPUs, while casting a shadow on NVIDIA’s latest silicon.

This article will not cover the quality of the gameplay experience, as is our usual fare. Instead, today’s preliminary tests are to find out who has the fastest video cards for playing Half Life 2 in apples to apples benchmarks. This will dispel many of the myths being rumored about Half Life 2 performance as we cut to the chase and see who has the fastest Half Life 2 AGP video card.

One thing we did not want to do was use canned timedemos supplied by ATI. As you know very well that those demos would of course favor ATI strong points while possibly not reflecting overall Half Life 2 gameplay. This is not to say that ours will not favor ATI, but in this constant world of “very aggressive” video card marketing, we felt it best to use custom made timedemos that HardOCP had full editorial control over. We may very well make these public soon, but that has yet to be decided.

We went about trying to find some good maps to use in Half Life 2, which would show all visual aspects of actual gameplay that one may experience. We found that overall, Half Life 2 played extremely fast in terms of framerate, with some areas in maps reaching the 200FPS mark. We also found that more often than not this game is CPUlimited with the high-end video cards like the GeForce 6800Ultra or Radeon X800XT-PE.

Nevertheless, we recorded two timedemos in two maps that we found involved gunfights, exploding barrels, smoke, shader effects and the very realistic looking Half Life 2 water. We recorded these custom timedemos playing through the entire levels of maps “d1_canals_01” and “d2_coast_03.” These timedemos are very long and can hardly be considered small samples of the game. With that said, we must also realize that when running timedemos, the CPU is not loaded with many of the AI and physics tasks that it normally would be during real-world gameplay.

We utilized Half Life 2’s timedemo feature to collect this average framerate data, which we then graphed. Here is a list of Half Life 2 console commands supplied to us by ATI that many of you will find useful. In order to enable the console, you will need to go to the Half Life 2 “Options” menu, then select “Keyboard,” then “Advanced,”, then checkbox “Enabled Developer Console.”

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All the game settings were set at their highest values with “Reflect World” selected. We ran the game at 1024x768 and 1600x1200 resolutions with 8X anisotropic filtering selected and utilized three levels of anti aliasing; NoAA, 2XAA and 4XAA.

Test Setup

ABIT AV8 (VIA K8T800), AMD Athlon 64 FX-53 2.40GHz, 4 X 512MB Corsair XMS PC3200LLPro TwinX Dual Channel DDR400, Western Digital 74GB Raptor SATA/150, Windows XP Professional SP2 with DirectX 9.0c.

We are using Beta drivers for all video cards. For all NVIDIA based video cards we are using the Beta ForceWare 67.02 driver available from nZone, and for all ATI video cards we are using the Beta Catalyst 4.12 drivers availble from ATI.