yeah, Steam is such trash. it works half the time and the rest of the time it sucks up all the system resources. my comp is old except for my 9800 pro. i mean i dont have problems with half life, just Steam. valve did a horrible job with steam and im one of the very few who still uses WON just because Steam sucks so much. maybe if they actually made Steam efficient... but if Steam is any reflection of their real ability to write code... then HL2 is going to be a disaster. HL2 and Steam so far have been nothing but one letdown after another. the only good thing about any of it is that apparently ATI cards outpreform NVIDIA. Ive always supported ATI because i always got better preformance their cards. all im waiting for now is for AMD to release their new FX-60 and the rest of their 4000+ series. oh well. ignore me, i dont know what im talking about..

I just want to say that ATI became just what Nvidia was before. It's ironic how now ATI rules in 3D and Nvidia has the best built quiality and tv-out quality. I bought a Super grace ATI 9700, it was almost dead on arrival, then bought an Sapphire 9700 PRO, it used to display corruption sometimes when logging on to windows. And tv quality is really crap, and the same for driver features. Please people, try concentrating on somehing else then just pure benchmarks

anyone noticed how a company died because they didn't want to use 32 bit color & stuck with 16 bit. well all i can say is i hope u die quicker nvidia so the video card noobs don't waste their money on ur crap (unless it's a dx8 GeF ti card)

It's REALLY funny when you think about the people who bought a GFX just to stick to nVidia.

http://www.anandtech.com/news/shownews.html?i=20525

what else do i have to say ?

$Nvida is stooping really low for this one

For me its not the performance issue (well, i have a R9700NP :) ) but the fact nVidia lied and continued to lie and cheat in drivers after it got caught and fooled people some of them blame now.. ATI / Valve / MS. :weird: Thats really strange. And if i wanted to play with medium-settings i would just set the details to "medium".No problem. Why ffs nVidia decides what settings have i play with. "The way Nvidia thinks you should play"..
#52 LiamC
Fully agree

As a technician of 24 years I have worked with both companies video cards and have always found that nVidia had better drivers...even down to the imperfect vga standard(never was fixed was it?)....Ati's drivers were problematic at best and the hardware was very tempermental with many systems so I doubt the slidshow you have to be anything more than a way to make more money for that Canadian company.....the proof is in your article....the Geforce 4 Ti4600 was close to the speed of the newer FX cards....but they use new drivers (same driver) also...I will bet you find somthing in the game code that makes the nVidia cards look bad....something that narrows the pipe to the engine and since the engine is dated but tweaked I would say it would almost be a sure thing.....check on it ...it will be there.....

this is bogus i have a leaked beta of hl2 it runs great on a ip4 2000 and a gf4200 128mb with 8xagp only its in dx8 big deal i pump out 60fps on a res of 1024x786 at 32bit with 3x aa so i dont know what al the fuzz is about????
for the record i have it on a asusp4p800 deluxe mainplate with 512ddr of GEIL late dudes

ROFL ... nice FAKE stats!

look: 9600 ATI is faster than a 5900Ultra ? ROFL!

a GeForce 4 Ti is faster than a FX5900Ultra ? ROFL!

Nice FAKE!

Everyone knows that Source is 5 years old. With their "tweaks" to support low-end computers as well, it is quite clear how much of the latest technology they've used in Source, despite what their slides may say.

That engine has been written and re-written over and over, with lots of inherent flaws. And for errors that are partly their own fault, Valve lashes out at nVIDIA.

nVIDIA is nVIDIA, and they're the BEST. Why do you think Epic and ID haven't complained about nVIDIA. I think it's time Valve took a serious look into the base code of their engine before lashing out at one of the best GFX card companies out there.

What's wrong with nvidia????

I will tell you all what's wrong with nvidia,,,3dfx they destroyed themselves with their stupid ideas of creating their own chips and parrallel proccesors and now their wacko ideas and engineers have infultrated nvidia,, the 5900's are a joke they remind me of the voodoo 6000's Nvidia wake up fire those idiot 3dfx dolts before it's to late... Last best nvidia card ti4200 next stupid nvidia move, an add on card for the 5900's to double the power at only one resolution

again #178, branching from the norm, you have to be prepared for a slap <or> raving success....

first the game has to come out, i could give 2 shits about vaporware bencharks..when its out in demo and i can run my tests ill have my conclusions..same with the curent issue....which is the tactic of nvidias pr to lie, cheat, and try to hide it and never fess up

the topic is cleary stated....we are disccussing nvidia tactics, they know the fucked up and wont admit it. and they continue to try to discredit and lie or buy there way out of it....

ati admited to cheating image quality in q3, and they listend and improved.

nvidia should do the same, but wont. they have so much vested in 3x that they will rape every consumer who buys the card without knowing the facts. thats what most of us are pissed about. the fleecing of the dumb ass consumer..

driver issues?? again to all driver whiners....wtf? i have yet to see any issues on the 3 other machines running ati cards...

my personal game box is a nvidia 5600, which i will replace with whaterver card runs the best image qaulity and speed....

the others are running

1 ati 8500 64meg cards @ 280/245
1 ati 9100 128meg cards @ 275/266 and 245
1 ati 9500 modded over to 9700....default clocks

when we game we have no issues from either side save for the fact that none of these card are dx9 save for the semi-9700. including the 5600 i own...

the driver issue is dead, if you have no other amunition your shooting blanks and havent a clue.

Who say's Half Life 2 is going to be good anyway?

After looking at the situation with the various card Manufactorers I've just bought a FX5900 Ultra and I'm completely satisfied with it.

I value stability over and above raw performance. I'd perfer to be able to play a game for several hours at a time rather than just serveral minutes.

The real key to this for me is what Carmack say's and does. He admits that the NV30's do have their faults, but for all the ATI/DX9 flag waving fanfare he still insists that for him OpenGL is the way to go not DX9.

This is encouraging for ATI owners. It's a travesty what nVidia have done, and alot of people have lost faith in them. Im now going to buy an ATI card; I was always put off ATI because their driver support for Softimage XSI was poor, but with XSI and ATI working with Valve, Im sure all that is or will be cleared up. Woohoo!

I think a lot of the posters are missing the point. DirectX, some of the buggiest shittiest code that I have at a pleasure to work on, is an awful standard developed by Microsoft. ATI is a partner with Microsoft where as Nvidia has always been at odds with them from continuing their strong support of OpenGL.

Big surprise, Nvidia's cards do not follow the rules set out by Microsoft. They focus on what they think makes a better card, not what Microsoft does. DirectX 9 has a few more bells and whistle than the other DirectXs but it is still shit. Who the hell wants their card to confirm to a shitty standard?

One thing that a lot of people seem to forget is that ATI's driver quality is still piss poor. You might not get good framerates on the NV side, but you can at least run the game for more than 10 minutes without your system crashing.

Well, well, well, i guess what we see now are the fruits of nVidia aquiring some old 3dfx staff and technology and putting it to work. Whats next, will they buy a card maker and start selling their own cards or something....

:D

Let me get this straight: For DOOM3 I will need a GFFX and for HF2 I will need a Radeon 9800. Doom3 benchmarks show the GFFX stomping the R9800 and HF2 benches show ATI at double the speed of the GFFX.

There is one problem though - both games have yet to be released. Besides that, I get the feeling that Nvidia and id are in bed together which is why id allowed sites to show benches of D3 even when ATI had no chance to work on their drivers...seems like ATI is trying to get the upper hand now by doing the same thing. D3 and HF2 will be huge games that sell a lot of high end hardware so my guess is that this is all a bunch of BS spewed fourth by the respective marketing departments of each company. Is it really a surprise that a new piece of hardware doesn't perform very well on a game that isn't even finished?

I'll wait for HL2 to launch before I buy any new hardware - I doubt they will ship a product that doesn't perform well on Nvidia hardware since that is the bulk of people buying their game. Maybe there is a problem with Nvidia hardware, possibly fixed through a driver update. I'm sure both companies will have fresh drivers for the holiday season so we'll see in a few months. I think this is just a bunch of FUD with some crappy DX9 drivers thrown in the mix - of course I want to believe that since I dropped $400 on my GFFX 5900 last month! :)

Jeff

Why is everyone bitching about ATI or nVidia cards? Put away your egosticks for a second and just ask yourselves why we have these so called modern games which REQUIRE hardware that costs thousands of $$$?! Several years ago and you could get amazing games on machines like the Amiga, now you have to pay $1000+ for these games? Instead of whining which card is better and how many $hundreds you wasted on it try not to let the games companies get away with it. They keep releasing this stuff and expecting you to spend more money on "upgrades" because you let them get away with it!

Excellent write-up, Damage--another reminder of why I became a TR regular. Thanks.

As for the HL2 benchmark, I hope TR has its graphing compyudah warmed up. :)

(OT, has TR considered using that new 3D graph patented by those clever kids at Johns Hopkins? It's such an obvious idea and improvement, and it would look nice with your L2 cache latency diagrams. It does appear to require a license or fee for use, though, which kind of irks me.)

I don't understand people here who just bought FX cards. Wasn't it obvious from almost every review that ATI cards were a better buy?

Funny how the HL2 benchmarks seem to jibe nicelywith what the "useless" synthetic benchmarks told us months ago.

Yeah, #27, I remember too, in fact I kept a copy of the interview:

"NVIDIA’s own CEO Jen-Hsun Huang recently gave an interview to The Mercury News and to acknowledge that his company will be back on top soon said the following: “Tiger Woods doesn't win every day. We don't deny that ATI has a wonderful product and it took the performance lead from us. But if they think they're going to hold onto it, they're smoking something hallucinogenic.

- February 3, 2003”

Who's laughing now, huh ?!

man that whole screenshot specific rendering thing is huge. I hope no one under-estimates what that means. Basically, nVidia was attempting to outright LIE to customers. No, it can't be passed off as an optimization or a bug, the only purpose it could POSSIBLY serve is to make people believe that they weren't reducing image quality when in fact they were.

I'm sorry to sound like a spaz, but if I were an nVidia owner, I would be calling my lawyer to consider a possible lawsuit based on that alone...

Dang I just bought a GF5900 128MB non-ultra for $249.

But with that said, I've had 3d Cards since the Matrox Mystic Era (B4 Direct X).

I found this interesting artilce about how ATI and Nivida implmented Shadders, and it ain't over yet. Looks like MicroSlop may have coded DX9 to match ATI hardware more than to create an open Standard.

http://www.3dcenter.de/artikel/cinefx/index_e.php

I guess OpenGL is the real open 3D Render, and does Value Say that Doom 3 is wrong with OpenGl and with what they say about Nivida?

Time will tell, read the article and then comment.

Foo -=FI=- SOF2

I want to see some G5 benchmarks! Oh wait, is Half Life 2 coming out for Macs? HAHAHA

That ATI 9600 Pro All-In-Wonder is looking like a great buy now. When does that sucker come out...I can't wait!!!! Come on ATI...give me the 9600 AIW!!!

This report confirms what I knew what would the NV3X series was going to turned out to be. NV3X series was almost like a NV25 on mad, slilcon steroids with broken DirectX 9 support. I just more glad that my investment in a Radeon 9700 PRO back a year ago was worthwhile despite paying the big $$$ for it.

ok, so the Valve benchmark will be out Sep. 30, right? by then the Det.50's may be be released(or not, depending on current situation now), THEN the TechReport benchies will tell all.

The Inquirer says bundling will be with R360(9800XT), no mention of RV360. So pay you're still (over)paying a lot of money for HL2 to be bundled with a top end video card (or is it the other way around? :)