Gaming Half-Life 2: Lost Coast Benchmarks

A little extra clarification: As steelmartin said, there are multiple types of HDR and I believe all cards shader model 2.0b and up support it in one fashion or another. That B is important, because I believe that FX5 series are excluded as SM2a products, at least as far as I know. Bigz will clear this up if I am incorrect, but I'm pretty sure that's how it works.

SM3 supports a more robust HDR by a number of magnitudes, due to the fact that it has an FP16 buffer (which ATI cards do not until the x1800). It also is supposedly easier to code for and runs a hair more efficiently than the SM2 version, but that's to be expected as it's true for nearly all of the SM3/SM2 discussion. Until Valve released Lost Coast info, it was widely accepted that the only HDR in commercial gaming was Far Cry's latest patch, which only supported SM3 cards. So it's not that it's an NVidia mass smear campaign (though since it's been disproven they haven't exactly helped spread that information), it's that nobody figured out how to do the same thing in SM2 until after it was already done in SM3.

However, the difference won't be noticed for many end users, as most current-market TFTs support a max of 1000:1 contrast ratio, and that's for a fairly expensive one (heh heh). So, is a valid misconception to clear up, but not because it was an NV smear campaign...it's because until valve bothered to do it, it wasn't even known to be able to be done.

 

quick question - where can i download the music from that vid??

 

Two links with HDR-demos:

HDR on DirectX 8.1(!) hardware:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/mshdribl/index.html

HDR on DirectX 9 hardware:
http://www.daionet.gr.jp/~masa/rthdribl/index.html

 

WOW! Thanks, steelmartin, this clears up some misconceptions on my part.

I'm still not sure whether valve's HDR supports less than 2.0b. But I now see where you're coming from. Those are some impressive videos for that old of hardware!

 

Hi The_Pope

Did you see my Post above about resolutions?


Regards
D3lta

 

Wil actually put those together, but from looking at it, it's just a dodgy crop mate. Both are 1600x1200 screencaptures, but I think probably because the Dev Comments are switched on in the second, Wil decided to crop them out, resulting in the slightly smaller image, that's all.

 

Any idea how a 9800pro will take HDR? I've messed about with that source mod that 'enables' hdr on hl2. It looked pretty damn good on the game menu, but the game fell over when I tried to start a new game.

Linky.

 

very good article also. well done. I can see valve has done i very good job with hdr.
What catalyst version did you use for the benchs?
you didn't use other cards?
The objects in the Valve's engine can't cast shadows in themselfs or in other object. this is going to change?

 

My notebook has one of these: http://www.ati.com/products/Mobilityfglt2/

It may not be "fast" but it does run, and HDR works just fine - it's what I used to take all the screenshots in my Preview article. So HDR very much does run on SM2 hardware.

How will a 9800Pro fair? It's hard to say for sure, but take whatever FPS you get in HL2 currently and chop off 20-40% it seems - that will give you an idea. Please remember that Lost Coast has high-res textures & models that cause it to run slower than normal.

DoD: Source will be out in < 24 hours, and that has HDR without all the extra OTT eye candy, so that will give you a better idea. HDR has also popped up in Serious Sam 2 and Brothers in Arms - give those demos a go.

Exo: I didn't do the bench testing myself, so you'll have to wait until tomorrow for an answer. I'm personally running Omega Drivers v2.6.25 on my X850XT PE / 2.2 P4.

As for the shadowing issue, I don't have an official answer, but please bear in mind that the code we have is not final. In fact, it will be over a month old by the time Lost Coast is released, so it's possible Valve will fix this issue in that time.

 

Looks like I was right....shame CrossFire on the X850 sucks.

 

OK.. Thank you.....

Best Regards

 

Please keep on topic and direct Crossfire comments to the Crossfire thread: http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=98864

 

Will do!

 

I ran across this article when I was just looking for reviews of The Lost Coast and it startled me. How come you guys say that this game is unplayable with anything 5900 and below? Where in the world did you get the 5 FPS from? I completed The Lost Coast using these specs and I never once fell below 10 fps no matter how much I tried, my highest frame rate was 45 and the game was very much playable seeing as how I beat it. Sure I couldn't enable HDR but I had everything else turned up on High with a 1024x748 resolution.

2.02 Ghz P4 processor
1.2 GB's DDR PC3200 RAM
BFG GeForce FX 5700 Ultra

As proof of my statement I took the liberty of snapping some screen shots.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0000.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0001.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0002.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0005.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0007.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0009.jpg
http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e199/neko-sky-limits/d2_lostcoast0016.jpg

I never understood why these sites claim older video cards as instantly inferior. Do they actually even test the cards they say won't run or just take educated guesses? Maybe I have a magically enchanted video card?

I actually even got The Lost Coast to run on my old GeForce4 MX420 card with about 7-20fps with all settings set to low and the resolution at 640x480 after overclocking it.

 

I wasn't around when Bit-tech did this, but do bear in mind that the Source Engine has seen significant enhancements in the years since this article was written.