During ATI's "Shader Days" event, Valve's Gabe Newell conducted an unexpected presentation, sharing a set of benchmarks obtained from Half-Life 2, the game Microsoft themselves recommended yesterday, as the DirectX 9.0 standard. Mr Newell's presentation included some exciting and interesting information about the use of DirectX 9.0 features in H-L 2 but was far more interesting as far as Valve's conclusions about graphic solutions were concerned. Gabe Newell also clearly demonstrated his frustration at a certain company over the recent attempts to influence the outcome of benchmarks using driver-based optimizations. The conclusion of the presentation was clear The Radeon 9800 Pro is twice the speed of the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.
Half-Life 2, DX9 and Vice-Versa
According to the Newell presentation Half-Life 2 is a proper DX9 application and :
-is properly written to take advantage of DX9 -Uses a wide range of DX9 functionality -Half-Life 2 is an accurate predictor of future DX9 application performance -We see H-L 2 as a new benchmark for the type of amazing experiences that can be delivered on the Windows platform
DX9 Features -High Dynamic Range Lighting (HDR) -Bump Mapped Characters -Soft Shadows -Improved full scene Anti-Aliasing
DX9 Performance -More efficiently exposes hardware -9800 PRO, DX9 has same framerate as DX8 with more features
DX9 Ease of Implementation -New source functionality will be DX9 specific
