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The player again picks up the crowbar of research scientist Gordon Freeman, who finds himself on an alien-infested Earth being picked to the bone, its resources depleted, its populace dwindling. Freeman is thrust into the unenviable role of ...
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Valve & ATI cheated with HL2 ?
Everyone by now has heard about the struggle between nVidia and ATI to be the top performer in the graphics market. Until now, nVidia was crowned the top of the OpenGL games with Doom 3 as the main game, while ATI could be pleased to know that Valve's Half-Life 2 (and other DirectX9 games) would run best on their cards.
In fact, nVidia's FX cards even gave artefacts in Half-Life 2.
Over at the HardOCP Forums a thread has appeared in which it becomes clear that Valve and ATI have unnecessary programmed HL2 to make sure that nVidia's cards would run worse than ATI's.
In short: Valve crippled nVidia cards with their programming in Half-Life 2
In fact, nVidia's FX cards even gave artefacts in Half-Life 2.
Over at the HardOCP Forums a thread has appeared in which it becomes clear that Valve and ATI have unnecessary programmed HL2 to make sure that nVidia's cards would run worse than ATI's.
First off, you need 3dAnalyze. I'm assuming everyone knows that you can force HL2 to run in DX9 mode on FX cards, right? Only, you get artifacts in the water and other areas?
Well, that's pretty easy to fix. Just have the 3dAnalyze util report your card as an ATI Radeon instead of a GeForce FX.
*taddah* All the artifacts go away, and you get true DX9 reflections!
Okay, but there IS a performance hit doing that. How to get around that?
Well, the funny thing is that Valve coded Half-Life 2 to use FP24 shaders all the time every time. And it's really not needed. Nope. In fact, FP16 seems to do the trick most the time - as seen in that above pic. FP16 and FP24 are indistinguishable in Half-Life 2 for the most part.
Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You'll see virtually no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs* almost all the time, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced full precision in every shader op (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.
3DAnalyze can be downloaded here. However, use it ONLY to do tests as the tool isn't stable enough to play the whole game with.Well, that's pretty easy to fix. Just have the 3dAnalyze util report your card as an ATI Radeon instead of a GeForce FX.
*taddah* All the artifacts go away, and you get true DX9 reflections!
Okay, but there IS a performance hit doing that. How to get around that?
Well, the funny thing is that Valve coded Half-Life 2 to use FP24 shaders all the time every time. And it's really not needed. Nope. In fact, FP16 seems to do the trick most the time - as seen in that above pic. FP16 and FP24 are indistinguishable in Half-Life 2 for the most part.
Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You'll see virtually no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs* almost all the time, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced full precision in every shader op (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.
In short: Valve crippled nVidia cards with their programming in Half-Life 2
In other news:
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