NVIDIA responds to reports that the game doesn't run well on its cards.

Discussion in 'Videocards - NVIDIA GeForce' started by svcrawf72, Sep 12, 2003.

  1. svcrawf72

    svcrawf72 Guest

    NVIDIA responds to reports that the HL2 game doesn't run well on its cards.

    September 11, 2003 - Many of you have probably seen the performance numbers for Half-Life 2. The gist of things is that the game runs extremely well on ATI cards and poorly on NVIDIA cards. In fact, performance on the 5900 Ultra 256MB was likened to that on the Radeon 9600 Pro.
    Today NVIDIA sent out an official response that is pretty interesting. Check it:

    Over the last 24 hours, there has been quite a bit of controversy over comments made by Gabe Newell of Valve at ATIs Shader Day.
    During the entire development of Half-Life 2, NVIDIA has had close technical contact with Valve regarding the game. However, Valve has not made us aware of the issues Gabe discussed.

    We're confused as to why Valve chose to use Release. 45 (Rel. 45), because up to two weeks prior to the Shader Day we had been working closely with Valve to ensure that Release 50 (Rel. 50) provides the best experience possible on NVIDIA hardware.

    Regarding the Half-Life 2 performance numbers that were published on the web, we believe these performance numbers are invalid because they do not use our Rel. 50 drivers. Engineering efforts on our Rel. 45 drivers stopped months ago in anticipation of Rel. 50. NVIDIA's optimizations for Half-Life 2 and other new games are included in our Rel.50 drivers, which reviewers currently have a beta version of today. Rel. 50 is the best driver we've ever built. It includes significant optimizations for the highly-programmable GeForce FX architecture and includes feature and performance benefits for over 100 million NVIDIA GPU customers.

    Pending detailed information from Valve, we are unaware of any issues with Rel. 50 and the drop of Half-Life 2 that we have. The drop of Half-Life 2 that we currently have is more than 2 weeks old. It is not a cheat or an over optimization. Our current drop of Half-Life 2 is more than 2 weeks old. NVIDIA's Rel. 50 driver will be public before the game is available. Since we know that obtaining the best pixel shader performance from the GeForce FX GPUs currently requires some specialized work, our developer technology team works very closely with game developers. Part of this is understanding that in many cases promoting PS 1.4 (DirectX 8) to PS 2.0 (DirectX 9) provides no image quality benefit. Sometimes this involves converting 32-bit floating point precision shader operations into 16-bit floating point precision shaders in order to obtain the performance benefit of this mode with no image quality degradation. Our goal is to provide our consumers the best experience possible, and that means games must both look and run great.

    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.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 12, 2003
  2. Xian0

    Xian0 Guest

    Take that unbelievers !! :D
     
  3. RejZoR

    RejZoR Ancient Guru

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    I can only say SCRE.W Half-Life 2. Until then ill play Tron 2.0 and UT2003 that works very good on ATi and NV cards. Pha Source Engine...
     
  4. MizuChi

    MizuChi Master Guru

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    nice... :D
     

  5. TeuTonic

    TeuTonic Member

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    I heard recently on CNN that in the last 24hrs the information minister for Iraq was snatched from his home and shiped to the United States. Unconfirmed sources have said that was the request of a leading manufacturing computer hardware company,ie video,made the plea through the Pentagon.
    Sources have suggested a special opps unit was dispatched to the ministers recedence,and was hastefully carried away to an un specified location to be flown back emmediatly state side.
    Allthough un confirmed it is suggested that the ex Iraqi minister for information has been offered a lucradive deal as a PR spokes person fore a leading video card company.
    More to fallow.
     
  6. dfk

    dfk Guest

    Go Nvidia GO !! :D
     
  7. reever

    reever Master Guru

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    Im sure Valve won't mind, go on gamespy and you will see that more people play HL than every other FPS combined, 1 person missing wont hurt
     
  8. Big D.

    Big D. Guest

    Yeah...And speaking of Tron 2, I'm still not able to have glows in the full version of the game (they get stop working when I start a new game or load one). The patch didn't fix it either. I wouldn't say that Tron 2 works fine on both cards, since ATI obviousely didn't fix my little problem.
     
  9. nm+

    nm+ Don Cappuccino

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    My question is how can a driver "cheat" in a game. It either plays better or it doesn't, if it does play better with 50.xx, who exactly is getting hurt here? Optimizing a driver to work better on an anticipated game is not wrong. . . .
     
  10. Doobz

    Doobz Master Guru

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    valve specifically said in it's presentation that the reason they didn't use the 50.xx drivers is because they looked at them and saw those famous "optimizations," and they urged all benchmarkers not to use them either because of these "optimizations," some of them HL2 specific

    you honestly think nvidia would come out and say, "we screwed up, we'll do better next time?"

    of course not
     

  11. Doobz

    Doobz Master Guru

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    yes it is when it undermines certain DX 9 standards to achieve better FPS

    that's cheating to artificially inflate your scores that aren't even being made with the same standard that's expected
     
  12. TheReproducer

    TheReproducer Guest

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    Valve also claims that the det 51.xx has bugs which for example, can cause a whole level of fog to not be rendered...so err, kind of right that they don't use them, imo.
     
  13. Doobz

    Doobz Master Guru

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    yes, valve stated the reason the 50.xx drivers were used is because they saw general sub-DX9-standard cheats as well as a few HL2 specific ones in the drivers
     
  14. svcrawf72

    svcrawf72 Guest

    Doobz,

    So what you are saying is Nvidia realized the got caught using "optimizations" and now are working on making the 50 drivers legit? If this is the case then maybe the 50 drivers will fix the DX9 and the other issues. I hope it's not a hardware issue as Nvidia doesn't need 2 black eyes back to back! "5800/5900"

    I know people bash ATI and Nvidia and I have myself but reality is we need them both to keep the other one honest and to keep taking graphic cards into te future. If Nvidia didn't have another company right on their heels would they work so hard to be legit now? Sort of like EA Sports and Madden, EA doesn't work all that hard for the PC Madden as they do for PS2. Why, no one on the hills of EA in the PC department with football. It's a good and healthy thing for all the gaming world to have ATI and Nvidia fighting. When Nvidia comes out ahead one day people will come back and swear Nvidia is the BEST. a year or more later ATI will get ahead and Nvidia sucks. I encourage such behavior because in the long run I get better video cards and I know that if a card has a problem either company will work hard to fix the problems because their reputation is on the line!

    By the way, if the 50 drivers work out I will go Nvidia.

    What is EVGA rep like? How are they one the scale vs say ASUS, Gainward, and LEADTECH?

    Who makes the best 5900 Ultra 256 card right now out of the 4?

    I play all my games if possiable at 1600X1200 with high AA and AF
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 13, 2003
  15. Djuice

    Djuice Guest

    stupid optimizations.....

    should make cards with one default driver, thats should already use the full potential of the card, therefore there wont any cheating of the sort...
     

  16. svcrawf72

    svcrawf72 Guest

    SO the 5950 will be out at the end of Sept right?
    How are the specs for the card vs the 5900 Ultra "4x2 card and ATi's is a 8x1 card"
    Anyone know of pre-sales? Who will make them etc....?

    So basically Nvidia gave up on the 5900 to a point and is fixing it with the 5950 Ultra? I mean they don't want to say "sorry guys, the 5900 Ultra has hardware flaws and to fix it we need to make a new card instead of recalling all the 5900 Ultras". I am sure the 50. drivers will fix some if not many things with the 5900 Ultra and it still is a good card but it seems to me Nvidia might have an issue with something in the hardware that they feel they need to come out with a 5950 Ultra right now.

    This was a "question and a comment"

    It looks like the release of Half Life 2 has been pushed back again. Gamestop.com is showing an ETA of 02/02/2004.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 13, 2003
  17. Djuice

    Djuice Guest

    nvidia has being making big mistakes by releasing the NV3X cards too early. They were forced to release their cards because of the pressure ATI had a hold on them... With ATI taking the Top end of the market, Nvidia need to respond by their (crappy 5800) now ati release their 9800 and nvidia responds with their 5900, what would nvidia do if the new (9800 TX - 9900) is release, push out the 5950 before it completed and make another mistake.... I think they should atleast complete the card and test it completely to be totally compatible with DX9 instead of releasing their cards to compete with ATI..
     
  18. svcrawf72

    svcrawf72 Guest

    All this Nvidia garbage makes me go nutts! ATI is winning on many fronts and they about have me, why? Because no matter how much I want a Nvidia 5900 Ultra or above I just feel like giving up on it due to all the problems they are having and maybe next year try again. IMO buying a Nvidia card "5900/5950 or any new Nvidia card is gambling with $500.00. The past 2 cards have failed some way or another or have had some sort of problems! If I buy the 5950 it's to risky. Everyone thought after the 5800 mess up Nvidia would come back strong with the 5900 Ultra and it did make improvements but here we go again with something new. We hold are breath waiting to see if the 50. drivers will fix everything! As I said before, then why the need for a 5950? Even if the 50 drivers work it only puts the 5900 Ultra along with the ATI 9800 pro so..... I guess I will try Nvidia again a year or so from now and I know they will be strong again, one day!
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Sep 13, 2003
  19. svcrawf72

    svcrawf72 Guest

    Although it was originally thought that nVidia and ATI would release their next-generation GPUs this year, it now appears that both companies will not unveil their next-generation GPUs until 2004. nVidia's NV40 and ATI's R420 were both rumored for introduction around November. nVidia and ATI were both supposed to introduce marginally faster cards in September: ATI was to release a Radeon 9900, and nVidia was to sell the NV36. Now nVidia and ATI may wait to introduce these GPUs until well into the fall, and not introduce the next-generation parts until sometime in Q1 or Q2 of 2004. This delay, if it turns out to be real, is further evidence that the Moore's Law Cubed philosophy that was originally espoused by nVidia in 1999 is dead. Unlike in the past, neither ATI nor nVidia can count on frequent process shrinks to boost performance--both companies have delayed .13 micron production, and probably won't have 90 nanometer GPUs out for at least a year. Moreover, the two games that are supposed to benefit most from next-generation GPUs--Doom 3 and Half-Life 2--have both been delayed until the first half of 2004. Even with this slowdown in GPU introductions, GPU makers should be able to effectively double performance every year for the next couple of years.
     
  20. Cogar

    Cogar Master Guru

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    I read lots of complaining that NVIDIA cannot use their latest drivers, but the real issue is that the FX cards do not fully support DX9 in hardware as the ATI cards do. Anyone who has run a game using software mode realizes the substantial increase in performance available when using hardware acceleration. When you rely on drivers (software) rather than the GPU, your performance will suffer. That is not a condemnation of NVIDIA, by the way. Their results in Aqua Mark 3 seem to be just fine, since that benchmark allows the cards to fall back to earlier Direct X features.
     

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