To tack down one of the few loose ends in his case, Newell addressed the possibility of performance improvements in new drivers, casting a skeptical eye on promises of big speed gains. He made a distinction between good and bad optimizations, and even offered to help publications like ours sort through some of these issues, when needed.

Finally, Valve's top dog addressed potential accusations of bias head-on. The company recently signed a deal allowing ATI to distribute Half-Life 2 with its Radeon cards, but Newell made clear this was not a case of the tail wagging the dog.

To aid reviewers in evaluating graphics hardware, Valve will be releasing a new, Half-Life 2-based benchmark in the near future, with a full suite of tools and instrumentation to help reviewers (and end users) find performance bottlenecks. The test will output all kinds of useful data, including frame rate averages, deltas, and second-by-second frame rates. Reviewers will be able to record their own in-game demos for playback, and tools will include per-frame screen captures using either the graphics card or the DirectX reference rasterizer included in Microsoft's DX9 SDK.

Conclusions
No doubt there will be repercussions from Valve's unprecedented decision to address this topic in this way. We here at TR will be watching developments with interest, and we eagerly anticipate the opportunity give the new Half-Life 2 benchmark a spin. Valve's efforts to build a useful, detailed set of benchmarking tools into its new game are exactly what we want and need from developers.

At the same time, while the NV3x cards' weak performance numbers in Half-Life 2 with DirectX 9 are jarring, they don't come as a complete surprise. We have seen NVIDIA go to great lengths to protect its NV3x hardware from proper scrutiny in prominent benchmark applications like 3DMark03 and Unreal Tournament 2003. Results from the few other DX9-class benchmarking tools available, like ShaderMark, have not bode well for NV3x. Valve's frustrations seem to stem from the disconnect between its expectations—that NV3x cards were capable DX9-class graphics hardware—and the apparent reality—the NV3x is a capable performer in DX8-class games, but it lacks the hardware resources (floating-point pixel shaders, register space) necessary to run DX9 games in real time.

We've had difficulty confirming this reality because of a lack of good tools to measure DX9 performance, and because NVIDIA has been very guarded with details of the NV3x chips' internal configurations. It looks as though new games like Half-Life 2, and new benchmarking tools derived from them, are about to change all of that. We will have more to say about all of this soon, once we get our hands on the tests ourselves.