Albuquerque said:
Something to consider:
VR Zone's evaluation was done on older version of the Source engine, and was using a demo that was purposely CPU-limited. The physics and particle information on a 24-player deathmatch is not going to bottleneck your GPU... And for further proof, look at thier benchmark examples: the only place where the framerates really ever changed was at 1600x1200. AA was essentially "free" the entire time, simply because it wasn't the video card that was bottlenecking that demo.
That specific test you pulled was the "maximal" test -- this is the absolute maximum settings that each card could do. For ATI, that's 6xAA and 16xAF and for NVIDIA that's 8xAA and 8xAF. All other tests were done at the same AA/AF levels between cards, and all other tests showed a similar disparity in performance.
This still doesn't mean the numbers are accurate, but for the specific cases you pointed out, your complaints are not valid.
Good this means that since people plan on playing the game with people they will not notice a difference in speed until they turn on 8x fsaa and 16x anisotropic?
By the way it is good to see that they optimized the source engine for ATI. It means that they used cheats (others call them optimizations but I am a fan boy and when you refer to optimizations as a fanboy you call them cheats) and Nvidia in the end will look better but sacrifice some performance.
By the way, before you say Doom3 was optimized, keep in mind Carmack has basically said he tried his hardest to make the engine run well on ATI cards but they gave him nothing to work with feature wise which made it virtually impossilble. Not to mention the fact that there is a core flaw that made the x800's run the game very slow.
By the way a question that I have had, what shader path is used for the two cards. From the results I am guessing they have no ps3.0 path on Nvidia but use 2.0b for ATI which would not only explain the difference in speed, but also mean that Valve tried to screw over Nvidia, with a big game like this why would you do that?
I am still going to get half-life because it will be more than playable at 1280x1024 with 4x fsaa and 8x af. And personally I only need a certain level of beauty, the diff from 8x to 4x isn't noticeable to me unless I stop playing the game and stare at the edges with my face pressed to the screen.
/rant off
p.s. Now the only thing I need to figure is how to get Half-Life 2 in past my brother, I need something to play besides Doom3 (not because the game is boring, but rather becuase it was short, and I can't stand playing any FPS through twice) until STALKER and FEAR come out, but for some reason he is convince that Valve is evil and that my 50 dollars will make a difference (which it will. The CEO can now buy his kid a candy bar to go with his Lamborghini!)
/e prepares be forced to fight his brother just play a game because his brother is some type of moron.
p.p.s. I really don't have an agenda for either ATI or Nvidia, I just truly believe that nv40 is a much better for than the r420. And in almost every game besides Doom3 and Halflife I have been wrong and they have been EQUAL, I personally see them both to be completely equal now in all aspects, one game each where they do comclusively better. But of course both are still playable at beautiful levels.