hl2 performace - nvidia vs ati from valve

just foudn this on THG:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/busines...911/index.html

this suprised me a lot,
http://www6.tomshardware.com/busines...ges/image6.gif

it took them 5x longer for the mixed mode codepath than the full precision codepath, yet it only benifits the fx5900u.. whats the point? maybe it will benifit newer cards like 5700 and 5950, are there any differnces between these cards apart from clock speeds?

i think the mixed mode codepath is probably what has casued the main delays with hl2, and the reson they left it so late to announce maybe becuase they though nvidia was releasing a new card to correct it, or new drivers that would help

ummm or the theft of their source code! duh!

Or the typical delays... just like Doom3, Duke Nukem... lol... etc

Its worth it for them b/c nvidia has a very large market share... they wouldnt bother optimizing for anyone but ATi or Nvidia (has almost 100% of the gamers market between the 2 of them). (dont count integrated graphics.. b/c any real gamer would upgrade) They may do a little work to make sure its compatible with the other graphics vendors.... Intel integrated, Sis, etc...

Dude - This debate is 2 months old, where have youu been? You have made a THOUSAND posts in 3 months - have these all been in the small form factor section or what?

Nvidia hardware just doesnt have enough pixel shader grunt to run at high precision and high speed. They got their design wrong. Valve were forced to alter their engine coding to accomadate nvidias flaws because 60% of ppl have nvidia cards and if HL2 wont run, they won't buy it.
Any wonder that the head Valve guy ripped into nvidia on their shader dat? - nvidia has cost them ( and others) hundreds of thousands of dollars by mis-designing their hardware.

Oh yeah AND THEIR CODE WAS NICKED.

The only way to salvage this thread is to talk about all the cool games that have slipped and how COOL January and Febuary [maybe march april] are gonna be (for Radeon owners ;) ):

HL2 Ground Control 2
X2 Deus Ex 2 - invisible war
Doom 3 Splinter Cell 2 - Pandora Tomorrow
UT 2K4 Prince of Persia - Sands of TIme
Far Cry

AND not forgetting

Harry Potter : Quidditch World cup.

Bundled free with your 5700 :D

Easy Now, F

Call me naive but how can you steal someones code, your telling me that a company like valve only had 1 copy of the source and no backups......

i'm pretty sure they had more than one copy, but someone exploited some function in Microsoft Outlook, afaik, which allowed them to gain access to the computer, and they managed to get the source code, pre-compiled maps (ie ones that can be opened with Hammer), and a fully-ish working version of the game... they also said that this is all valve had at the time (little more than what the e3 movies were based upon) and so valve wouldn't have been able to release it in september anyhow.

mark

Sounds like poo to me....

I'm with Trig on this one, Its just an excuse, software projects of HL2 scale are not precise, you can't release a crap product otherwise it won't sell, really good games take years to produce and i'm sure that Nvidia have been putting a lot of pressure on Valve to make sure hl2 is just as good on Nvidia hardware as it is on ATi kit.

TiG

Maybe NVidia chucked a load of cash at Valve to delay HL2 so they could work out the bugs and make up some crap excuse to delay it....