Looks like independant numbers will be coming soon, but from Valve's own numbers, there is definitly something going wrong on NVidia cards and DX9 stuff.



The "mixed mode" is a special NV3x codepath that they made that disables some DX9 features to try and get peformance up.

Ouch. Yep, I'm gonna need a new video card.

i wanna see 9700
not a bunch of geforce and one ati card

and one ati card

Suits me -- I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro .

There's also a post on Anandtech about this. They come to the same conclusion, and will post their own numbers tomorrow.

Ouch. Definately need to get a new ATI card it seems.

nVidia can't be too happy with these results though. Wonder what they'll say the reasons for the poor performance are?

I hope it's just an Nvidia driver bug that will be fixed in the next couple weeks...

Must be the same bug that generates a high quality screen capture from a lesser-quality real-time display I guess. Boy oh boy, when you start detecting a game's capture routines and then subbing out to render a new image instead of the real contents of the frame buffer, that's stooping pretty low.

Tony, you might be happy to know I hear they've disabled at least some of the fog in the NV code path, so you probably won't have that pop-through issue with HL2.

Bruno

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTE5LDE=
http://www.gamersdepot.com/hardware/video_cards/ati_vs_nvidia/dx9_desktop/HL2_benchmarks/001.htm
http://www.gamersdepot.com/interviews/gabe/001.htm

I just wish Gabe would have said something a couple of months ago instead of waiting until three weeks before the game is due out.

i believe the downfall is in the shader 2.0 algorithm on the cards.

Ah, the stuff just keeps flying, doesn't it?

Although it may be unpleasant to be a gamer caught in this crossfire, it is at least interesting.

This article may explain something about the terrible nVidia performance.

Basic summary that I can tell from that article is that NVidia choose a very different way of doing shaders compaired to ATI, and since the R300 is what DX9 was designed around, ATI sees the benefit of having better peformance with the native DX9 shader uses.

Not knowing what actually goes on during DX development, I'd just like to comment that this definitly seems like the typical MS game of setting standards. While OpenGL seems more like open source, and either company throws in what they want into the mix until a standard is decided on.