GeForce FX 5950 Ultra - Half Life 2 DX8/9

A comparison of the performance of Half Life 2 in both DirectX 8.1 and 9 modes on a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra. I used the game's recommended detail settings for each mode. 1280x720 resolution. The only difference is DirectX level.

The most apparent difference in quality that I've noticed is with the water. In DirectX 8.1 there is a subtle blocking effect. It's difficult to see in the video.

Test system = Core 2 Duo 2.67 GHz, Asrock 775i65G, 1GB PC3200, GF driver 93.71, Audigy 4. Latest Half Life 2 version off of Steam.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• half
• life
• nvidia
• geforce
• fx
• 5900
• 5950
• nv35
• nv38
• ultra
• directx
• pixel
• shader

[leileilol]

Don't you dare try Lost Coast on FX with DX9 forced. It's gonna look ugly and be slow as hell.

[swaaye]

@leileilol oooh I guess I'm going to have to test that out. ;)

[FOGoticus]

Horrible framerate.

I hate the fact that nvidia rushed the project for the FX series. If they could have waited a little longer and impleement shader model 2.0 instead of crappy 2.a...

[gaga1298]

just edit the dxsupport.cfg from half life 2/bin i guess and replace the geforce fx 5950 info from the braces with the info from ati radeon 9800 pro and will work just fine in dx9 mode

[swaaye]

@kawaiifreak860 The problem with FP16 was that it didn't speed up ATI and so FP16 was ignored once developers realized that NV3x was likely a lost cause for fancier DX9 effects. NV30/36/34 had that partly DX8 INT design which also hurt them (useless transistors for DX9). NV35/37 are full FP but still didn't have the throughput of ATI. Apparently NV also had a horrible time getting the NV3x driver shader compiler efficient so custom shader assembly was basically required for it to perform.

[kawaiifreak860]

@swaaye

It's because they were meant to handle SM2.0 in 64-bit precision but the programmers were lazy and opted for 128-bit and shunned 64-bit as did nvidia despite 128-bit being the cards weakness, as 128-bit + 4x2 = Slow while 64-bit + 4x2 = Fast.

Plus nviida used old DX 8 INT coding for 128-bit mode not Floating point precision.

[swaaye]

@kawaiifreak860 Not really. It's more that if a developer specifically wrote their shader programs for the NV3x architecture, it might run ok. The truth is that the architecture was very poor for shader model 2 compared to ATI R3x0. See this article for some details on why that is - alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/cinef­x/index_e.php

[F2bnp]

I still can't believe Nvidia released these cards. I mean come on this one was supposed to be their best card... It doesn't do badly on DX8 at least and the difference is not that great. Oh and yeah, Lost Coast. Just do it!!! :P