Now, knowing full well every half life 2 fanboy will blow a gasket and spend the rest of his existence flaming me, I think Half Life 2 doesn't really look all that great.

Repeat after me... people that get worked up over one company's products are stupid. A company that could care less about you - but I'm sure they don't mind the free advertising.

I'm sure Hellbinder will be along any minute now to prove my point. I think I'll just save him the trouble (and save us a chunk of our sanity)...

blah blah ATI rulez blah blah nVidia sucks blah blah Half-Life2 will be the most orgasmic gaming experience in the known universe. (I'm sorry Kim Smith, Tyra Banks, Salma Hayek, Anna Kournikova, Monica Bellucci, and Catherine Zeta-Jones-Douglas... you all just do not compare. Our dreams are occupied with the lustful images of silicon hardware - not silicone software...)

If I could wrap up all fanboys, ricers, fredrickson, and Michael Jackson in a big barbed-wire, rocket-powered bundle and send them all screaming into the sun, I would be a very happy person.

Tribes:Vengeance will squash HL2 like a tiny, insignificant bug anyways.



---------------------------------------------
[No pixels were harmed in the making of this post.]

Bad AMD drivers by nvIDia?

Query : AMD drivers?

Edit : Just been looking over that firingsquad article, and looking at the screenshots in it. Now, knowing full well every half life 2 fanboy will blow a gasket and spend the rest of his existence flaming me, I think Half Life 2 doesn't really look all that great.
Those screenshots are taken at 4xFSAA and 8xAF? The very first screenshot, the wall looks sharp up until that shimmering portal, but the wall near the door just looks like ass. Isn't AF supposed to rectify that? Is it actually functioning, I wonder?

Same for those fire screenshots, it just doesn't look all that shithot to me.

As for the benchmarks, yawn, who cares. ATI paid Valve money to make it run faster on ATI, mystery solved. ATI doesn't have a good OpenGL driver, which is why Nvidia clocks them in Doom 3, in this game the slight edge of the X800 shows, plus whatever artificial slowdown Valve put in to show that ATI = Teh Win.

I mean, check every other benchmark in existence, and there isn't THAT much difference between the X800 and the 6800, (with exception of Doom 3, and with the exception that the 6800 is something put together by mongolian children with parkinson. Nice cooling and power requirements there, Nvidia) so there's gotta be something going on behind the screens, right?




Creston

This comment was edited on Aug 20, 19:36.

like i posted in another thread yesterday. 120 fps with a 6800 ultra with 6xAA(4?) and 8xAF. i'm not complaining interesting to see tho that in some of these benches they get far under what i do and some are right at what i do(even with a faster cpu). kooky

Sweet, my 9800 Pro 256 is getting 45+ fps at 1280*1024 with 4xAA/8xAF. It can only get better too.

That cools my desire for a new card, especially now that I've finished Doom III and have no desire to bother playing it again.

Now just give me HL2, Dangit! (And keep CS!)

_________________________
Gameplay before graphics.

Good ole ‘ Tech Report, people who know how to run fucking benchmarks properly.
http://techreport.com/etc/2004q3/source-engine/index.x?pg=1

Yes ATi still wins, but not over ridiculously like all these others.


_____
Enahs
I don’t wanna…You do it.

Lemme know how my 2400+ with a 9800 pro in it will cope. I bet it's a far more common setup then a 3.4 with the latest cards and sata hard drives atm.

One reason they don't test the low-end processors is because the older processors invariably become a bottle-neck when you install the latest $500 card. And they are posting a graphics card comparision, not a processor performance comparision

You cannot make anything fool-proof. The fools are too inventive

these tests are only meant to bechmark graphics card performance. a better cpu will show better fps, but this performance is not (shouldn't be) representative of actual game play performance... for example, there is no AI being processed

Hey Cy, did you read the entire FiringSquad article? it includes 9800Pros (both 128 and 256).

*blushes* oops checked the first couple of pages but thought would be the same as the doom 3 benchmarks - the minute a new card comes out h/w review sites seem to forget old cards exist!

I recently upgraded from a Geforce 4600 to the 9800 pro and had one hell of a hardtime finding decent roundups which didn't involve 64 bit processors, linux etc etc

Hey Cy, did you read the entire FiringSquad article? it includes 9800Pros (both 128 and 256).

Yeah but with a super fast AMD 3400 base. But yeah, as you say, it's for people looking to upgrade.

Cy, a fuller set of benchmarks will come closer to launch. Besides which, these aren't of much use except to show that Ati > nVidia in HL2's case. Which we all knew. As Gabe said, they're not a great indication of actual HL2 gameplay.

also, these articles are mainly going for those people looking to upgrade... people who want to know what they should be upgrading to.

Hey Cy, did you read the entire FiringSquad article? it includes 9800Pros (both 128 and 256).

Why do they never benchmark on the cards the majority of people are using. Yeah so very nice a shiny new £400 card will play the latest games with all the bells and whistles on.

So what???? Lemme know how my 2400+ with a 9800 pro in it will cope. I bet it's a far more common setup then a 3.4 with the latest cards and sata hard drives atm.

This little program takes care of everything for you. No messing with extracting a boot loader and crap. Just point it to your WinXP CD and the SP2 file, click a button and it creates a bootable .iso for you.

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=188337&st=0

Well, part of the CounterSMACK: Source release (for all the cafe/ATI/CZ peeps so far...) is the VST. Unless they plan on being total jerks, I would expect them to release that publicly very soon. It's not even a playable demo, but it would be something to whet peoples' appetites.

Of course, it is not like Valve is known for being super talkative - there are numerous questions about performance (give us the VST, dam'mit,) the release (September or November,) public releases of CounterSMACK: Source, the "Collector's Edition" (what is in it,) etc.

Ro><oring at TFC, but majorly su><oring at DoD right now,
[Blue's]Lagged-Newbie Ray

-----
HAIL ALL PLANET ZYGON...ER...THE RAY MARDEN OF THE BLUE'S NEWS.
http://users.ign.com/collection/RayMarden
http://www.dvdaficionado.com/dvds.html?cat=1&id=ray_marden
I love you, mom.

will there be a public version released ?

it wil be interesting to see wether 3rd party devs will go for ids' tech or unreal 3.0.
but from what comments i've read on source, it might have swayed a few devs to go with source.

howdee duke nukem = i'm Source


This comment was edited on Aug 20, 05:44.

I keep finding myself wanting to go back over to my friend's house and loading up Source and shooting the tire across the room again. Oh, and the splinters, the splinters!

It just felt so much more accurate and unincumbered compared to Doom3. The amount if environmental interaction seems phenominal. I couldn't even crush the big-mac box in Doom

FiringSquad updated their article; there were some incorrect graphs in places.

Anyway, looks like ATI p\/\/n3d Nvidia in this.

It will be interesting to see what, if anything, nVIDIA has to say about this. If anything, I wish these got a little bit more into the fine details like the original [H] article did with Doom 3.

If these do hold up, I do think it is a bit sad that the 6800s come out so far behind the X800s. I had no doubt that pre-6800 NvIdIa cards would get creamed, but I was especting the 6800 to do better. I wonder why so many of the early, unofficial benchmarks showed the 6800 on even ground or even ahead? I do not feel so bad personally as it is still faster than my 9800xt would have been.

It is a bit worrisome that both cards were showing graphical defects, though I was able to play Doom 3 with my GT clocked to Ultra levels the whole time without any issues. I am not worried, but I would expect issues for many others.

The more I see of the game, the more I am impressed by it along with its overall speed. Doom 3 may have some nice graphics...in that one small room...completely in the dark...but I think Half-Life 2 will have a much nicer looking world.

Lots of little differences, good and bad, in shots from both cards...

Edit: The Gamers-Depot results do not show as extreme of a gap. However, it is the only site to test with a Chipzilla (Intel) chip. Bad AMD drivers by nvIDia? Also, note the (usual) architecture defference - when not using AA or AF, Gamers-Depot shows the results being even closer.

Edit 2: Whereas CounterSMACK is even closer:
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=1181&s=7

Hating depth blur with a passion,
Ray

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HAIL ALL PLANET ZYGON...ER...THE RAY MARDEN OF THE BLUE'S NEWS.
http://users.ign.com/collection/RayMarden
http://www.dvdaficionado.com/dvds.html?cat=1&id=ray_marden
I love you, mom.
This comment was edited on Aug 20, 08:13.

I noticed that the numbers for the 6800 on the FiringSquad article in the high end section and the last gen section are different. What's up with that?

The judge was reported as ending the session swinging down the gavel and shouting "PWN3D"!