Following up on some comments from Gabe Newell and the Half-Life 2 benchmarks presented at yesterday's ATI festivities (story), NVIDIA has issued a statement in response, which has been posted on 3DGPU and Gamers Depot. The statement questions the use of older drivers for benchmark comparisons, offers their understanding that there is only one Half-Life 2 bug remaining in their newest (as yet unreleased) drivers, and concludes like this:

The optimal code path for ATI and NVIDIA GPUs is different - so trying to test them with the same code path will always disadvantage one or the other. The default settings for each game have been chosen by both the developers and NVIDIA in order to produce the best results for our consumers.

In addition to the developer efforts, our driver team has developed a next-generation automatic shader optimizer that vastly improves GeForce FX pixel shader performance across the board. The fruits of these efforts will be seen in our Rel.50 driver release. Many other improvements have also been included in Rel.50, and these were all created either in response to, or in anticipation of the first wave of shipping DirectX 9 titles, such as Half Life 2.

We are committed to working with Gabe to fully understand his concerns and with Valve to ensure that 100+ million NVIDIA consumers get the best possible experience with Half Life 2 on NVIDIA hardware.