Frame Rates for Half-Life 2

Shader Day is Upon Us

We're here in Seattle covering the Shader Day event, organized by ATI, as they are showing off the 2.0 Pixel and Vertex Shader. Valve has just finished their slide presentation on the topic and has allowed us to give you the graphs in this article that are the results of their own internal testing of recent ATI and NVIDIA hardware when running Half-Life 2. Some of the text you see in this article will be taken directly from their powerpoint slide presentation.

Note: All references to the Radeon 9600 Cards are actually the PRO version - some of the graphs and text leave out the PRO designation, but that is the card that was tested in the benchmarks

As you can see from the chart above, the GeForce FX cards lag behind significantly in FPS performance.

Half-Life 2 Meets DX9

Using the new features of DirectX 9, Half-Life 2 will sport High Dynamic Range lighting (HDR), bump mapped characters, softer shadows and advanced full screen anti-aliasing. The engine will use the processing power of current hardware more efficiently whilst keeping framerates the same as DirectX 8 but with the added goodness of more features. The Half-Life 2 DX9 Demo will feature all the advanced features above and videos of it will be available for download or via Steam.

Here is a quick breakdown of the specifications of the current hardware by ATI and NVIDIA.