Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 1 - DirectX 9 Shootout

Final Words

When Valve and ATI came together to show us the first inklings of Half Life 2 performance last year, it did not look pretty for NVIDIA.  NVIDIA’s highest end card at the time, the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra, could not even outperform a Radeon 9600 Pro in most tests – much less anything from ATI at its price point.  Even though we haven’t shown it here (that’s coming in Part II), the situation has not changed for NVIDIA’s NV3x line of GPUs – they still must be treated as DirectX 8 hardware, otherwise they suffer extreme performance penalties when running Half Life 2 using the DirectX 9 codepath.  To give you a little preview of what is to come, in DirectX 9 mode, the GeForce 5900 Ultra offers about 1/3 of the performance of the slowest card in this test.  If you’re unfortunate enough to have purchased a NV3x based graphics card, you’re out of luck with running Half Life 2 using the DX9 codepath (at any reasonable frame rates). 

What we were missing from looking at Half Life 2 performance a year ago was the release of NVIDIA’s NV4x line of GPUs, which have effectively “saved” NVIDIA from delivering embarrassing performance under Half Life 2.  In fact, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 line of GPUs actually runs Half Life 2 extremely well, even when pitted up against equivalently priced competition from ATI. 

Our final Head to Head comparisons revealed a few interesting things:

The GeForce 6800 Ultra performs very similarly to the X800 XT as long as antialiasing and anisotropic filtering are disabled.  With those two features enabled, the X800 XT begins to show a performance advantage that is truly seen at 1280 x 1024 and 1600 x 1200 with 4X AA enabled.  If you are running with AA disabled, the two GPUs perform very similar to each other.  It is only at 1600 x 1200 that the performance becomes somewhat noticeable between the two, as the X800 XT averaged 8% faster than the 6800 Ultra.  However, turning on antialiasing and anisotropic filtering gave the X800 XT between a 4 – 20% advantage depending on resolution, which definitely isn’t shabby. 

At the $400 price point, the X800 Pro and the GeForce 6800GT are basically equal performers in all of the resolutions we tested (regardless of whether or not AA/aniso was enabled).  So the recommendation here goes either way, look at the performance of the cards in some of the other games you play to determine which one is right for you. 

If you’re spending $200 - $300 you’ve got three choices for PCI Express graphics cards, and one for AGP.  The NVIDIA GeForce 6800 is 12-pipe underclocked version of the 6800GT/Ultra and currently sells for close to $300, however in Half Life 2 the performance of the regular 6800 is not any better than the cheaper 6600GT, thus making our NVIDIA recommendation clear.  But how does the 6600GT stack up to the X700 XT?  The two GPUs are basically equal performers under Half Life 2, although the X700 XT is faster with AA enabled. If you need an AGP card however, then the 6600GT AGP is your only option (and far from a bad one at that).

We’ve left a number of questions unanswered here today involving older/slower hardware, so be sure to check back for part II of our Half Life GPU comparison to find out how well older hardware performs under Valve’s amazing game.  Thanks for taking a break from playing Half Life 2 to read this, now get back to it…