Something wrong with the HL2 Story

[palmerston]

First post at nvnews.net.

There's something wrong with the story about Valve not supporting nvidia, or seeming to bless ati and not nvidia for FSAA.

Remember when you last upgraded HL with their patch? You were invited to take part in a survey. Take a look at the results;
http://valve.speakeasy.net/

63% of their users are nvidia based.

Now add in the fact that the latest Mercury market research (http://www.mercuryresearch.com/statistics) just published show that nvidia still dominates with over 65% of the desktop add in card market, compared to ati with something like 25%. Unfortunately you cant see the market share stats in their webpage (they make you pay) but anyone in the pc industry knows them and knows these numbers are correct.

YOU might buy an ati card over this story if its true but the fact remains that the majority of valves customers and consumers wont - they'll be using nvidia and so doing anything that makes them seem anti nvidia would be a bad move for them. Especially since doom3 looks like its been made for geforcefx based on the results so far.

The other interesting fact is that the story talks about dx9, does that mean that HL2 doesnt support opengl any more - does anyone know? If it does then can it be run in FSAA in opengl?

I'd like to know that.

 

[Ostsol]

FSAA implementations in OpenGL and DirectX aren't really much different. . . What I'd like to know is what situations is it where FSAA causes artifacts. They mentioned that it occurs in any application where many small textures are packed into a large one, but the only uses I can think of for that is for animated textures (animated sprites included) and fonts. It should be possible to simply turn off FSAA for instances where such things are being rendered and then switching it back on for the rest of the scene. Of course, this can only work when the application controls FSAA and the driver is set to application preference.

 

[vrecan]

They have stated that its going to be DX and only DX for the foreseable future. They have said nothing about not supporting nvidia cards, all though they do seem to favor ati because they been known to say off camera that a lot of the shaders they use run around 5-10x faster on the r350 core then on the nv35! So their bias is there for a reason. If you would have been reading in the Inudusty's forum you would already know that in pretty much every dx9 app the fx has been cutting corners to try and remain close to ati cores in speed and still having probs with anything that uses a lot of registries. And from what I have read it is imposible to pull of AA in the nv30-nv35's because they dont support it in hardware the way they want. From what I have heard its actually part of the ps3 and vs3 feature set and ati already supports it now. Only problem is dx9 doesn't let you have use of it unless you have all ps3 and vs3 features so thats why they are looking for a way to get around this through the drivers. With doom3 the only reason why its performing well on the fx cards is because it just uses 1 small shader to pull of the lighting effects and thats it! And this shader doesn't even require high precision (basing this off his .plan statement) Which said that he was able to lower the precision in it with out any loss in quality. I dont blame them for going ATI, shows that they aren't marketing whores like the rest of them, they chose the best performing card with the most DX9 install base I dont see a prob with this.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

It's been stated by Valve employees that it is the case that Nvidia cards do not have the necessary hardware, and the ATI R3x0 does (though it's not currently exposed in the API).

There are already threads in the gaming and technology forums if you want the full details, but it seems pretty solid that NV3x cannot, and never will be able to do AA with HL2 without serious visual artifacts.

I suspect that the way Valve view it is that their engine is already very scalable, and it's only the very small number of top end users that will crank up all the eyecandy and *still* want AA/AF. I don't necessarily agree with this - users may want to turn down the res *in order* to use AA. Valve think that it won't matter because R360/NV40/R400 isn't far off, and they can get the hardware changed for the future.

Ultimately, Valve seem to be supporting ATI because ATI hardware support the HL2 software technology better, and runs faster, probably due to the heavy use of shaders that Nvidia NV3x seems to be very deficient on. It's always the case that developers like the hardware that gives their software the best results.

 

[Nick]

You were invited to take part in a survey. Take a look at the results;

44% software rendering... so that means Half-Life 2 will have a software renderer too?

 

[palmerston]

vrecan, you seem very credible technically until you state that ati has the greatest installed dx9 base, thats not true at all.

ati sold approx 1.3-1.5m R3xxx parts. Sales have slowed dramatically the last qtr as they had planned to go wide with rv350 (9600) but issues with the move 0.13u have prevented that happening. In fact rv350 is so bust that this has caused the move to r360 (for a speed boost) and rv360 to fix some metal layer issues.

ati has done well with some oems with the 9200 but as we both know thats dx8. One wonders what will happen to those sales if nvidia were to suddenly make an aggressive price move.

On the other hand nvidia is reputedly selling millions of its geforcefx range inc both the 5200, 5600 and 5900. We can assume that most of these are 5200 and 5600 which you may not like but it does mean that nvidia is setting the pace for dx9 and not ati.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030428.watii428/BNStory/Technology/

This looks like valves problem more than nvidia's.

 

[DegustatoR]

Now... What kind of "hardware support" regarding FSAA is in R3x0 hardware and not in NV3x?

All this story is a bit strange if you ask me. Especially when you take into the picture that NV3x is much closer to shaders 3.0 than R3x0.

Maybe Valve simply don't want to allow NV-users to turn FSAA on b/c of a low overal perfomance on NV3x, even without FSAA?

And what about GF3/4? And what about Parhelia's FAA? And how about SSAA from R2x0?

This is getting interesting...

 

[Dave Baumann]

AFAIK, Valves appreciation for ATI's hardware (note: not necessarily ATI) stems from more than just the FSAA issue.

 

[gkar1]

ATI follows the dx9 spec more closely and optimally than nvda, its as simple as that. And the statement of nv3x being closer to ps3.0 is laughable. In their current drivers you can't even expose all of the ps2.0 functionality its supposed to have.

Its good for PR reasons but you can't play with some "supported" paper specs.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Now... What kind of "hardware support" regarding FSAA is in R3x0 hardware and not in NV3x?

All this story is a bit strange if you ask me. Especially when you take into the picture that NV3x is much closer to shaders 3.0 than R3x0.

Certainly not in performance, or in the centroid sampling that the Valve guys want for AA:

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6927
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6905
http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6926

 

[palmerston]

you miss the point

for all I know ati may have a better chip for hl2 but thats hardly going to help when most of the game buying public are buying nvidia products. its like valve backed betamax when the world was going to vcr.

I couldnt give a monkeys elbow what ati does, I trust nvidia and their drivers and I like the "the way its meant to be played" it makes it easier to choose games knowing that they'll look good on my pc.

 

[gokickrocks]

with that thinking, game devs would still mainly be programming for 3dfx

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

you miss the point

for all I know ati may have a better chip for hl2 but thats hardly going to help when most of the game buying public are buying nvidia products. its like valve backed betamax when the world was going to vcr.

I couldnt give a monkeys elbow what ati does, I trust nvidia and their drivers and I like the "the way its meant to be played" it makes it easier to choose games knowing that they'll look good on my pc.

You've got it the wrong way around - software sells hardware. People buy a game, and then if they find their hardware isn't good enough, they go and buy better hardware to play it. All those people waiting for HL2 will now buy ATI hardware rather then Nvidia hardware, because Valve says so.
Don't forget, that you will still be able to play HL2 on Nvidia NV3x cards, but you'll only (hopefully) get clean AA and decent shader speed on R3x0 cards. In this case you "knowing they'll look good on my PC" because of TWIMTBP will in fact be *wrong*.

Your analogy doesn't really work because vhs/betamax were exlusive of each other. Imagine you could buy movies that would work in either a VHS or betamax machine, but that they looked better in every way in a betamax machine. Now imagine that there is a particular movie that is one of the most anticipated movies of the year. If you want to see this movie and watch it over and over again, and you are in the market for a new video player anyway, which are you going to buy? VHS that plays your movies fine, or betamax that also plays all your movies fine, but also plays a significant portion of your movies a lot, lot better?

 

[Oompa Loompa]

First post at nvnews.net.
YOU might buy an ati card over this story if its true but the fact remains that the majority of valves customers and consumers wont - they'll be using nvidia and so doing anything that makes them seem anti nvidia would be a bad move for them.

Most HL2 customers will be using hardware that is barely capable of running the game well - FSAA will not be a realistic option, even if it works.

And in any case, only the most crazed nVIDIA-worshippers could be offended by the simple statement that nVIDIA hardware doesn't work properly with their chosen method of texture storage.

However, for those of us who want the best possible experience... Valve obviously should have avoided using any techniques that were going to be this problematic. I assume they got their first R9700 at least a year ago, but it seems to have taken them a while to realize that they had a problem. Never mind that nVIDIA cards may be "unfixable" - even if those worked fine and ATI cards *might* be unfixable, the marketing situation would be bad enough.

Valve must first have noticed this issue last Summer, and asked ATI about it. So why are we still hearing "there *might* be a workaround added to ATI's drivers"?

 

[Exxtreme]

First post at nvnews.net.
Remember when you last upgraded HL with their patch? You were invited to take part in a survey. Take a look at the results;
http://valve.speakeasy.net/

63% of their users are nvidia based.

You have forgotten one thing: only a very small part of the 63% will be able to play hl2 with aa on. The biggest part of the 63% is playing cs. And cs runs very well with a 700 mhz-cpu + tnt2.

 

[silhouette]

vrecan, you seem very credible technically until you state that ati has the greatest installed dx9 base, thats not true at all.

ati sold approx 1.3-1.5m R3xxx parts. Sales have slowed dramatically the last qtr as they had planned to go wide with rv350 (9600) but issues with the move 0.13u have prevented that happening. In fact rv350 is so bust that this has caused the move to r360 (for a speed boost) and rv360 to fix some metal layer issues.

ati has done well with some oems with the 9200 but as we both know thats dx8. One wonders what will happen to those sales if nvidia were to suddenly make an aggressive price move.

On the other hand nvidia is reputedly selling millions of its geforcefx range inc both the 5200, 5600 and 5900. We can assume that most of these are 5200 and 5600 which you may not like but it does mean that nvidia is setting the pace for dx9 and not ati.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030428.watii428/BNStory/Technology/

This looks like valves problem more than nvidia's.

Palmerston: That article does not necessarily mean that Nvidia has sold more dx9 part than ATI. In fact, it was reported that Nvidia has been still facing difficulties in production of the .13u parts that of course includes 5600 and 5900 series. In fact, this is opposite about ATI.. I still think that most of these sales are still dx7/dx8 parts (gf4/gf4mx). And valve definitely supports these cards but by turning off some eye-candy stuff.
For gf4mx, I guess you still have to turn off a lot of features to play the game, so there is no point to support FSAA on this generation anyway. For GF4Ti series, I think you have to either turn off the shader stuff and enable AA, or enable shaders but not AA for acceptable speeds. I guess many people will favor the first option, so it is not necessary to support AA in these cards also..

For dx9 part, if you browse some other thread, you will see that GeforceFX hardware has some limitations in order to provide acceptable shader speed (i.e. 4 register use in FP16/2 register use in FP32), which requires more specialized optimizations like Carmack did in Doom3. But of course, maybe this might even be impossible in some cases. (I heard that they are using DX-HLSL for pixel shaders). And FYI, many of the shader supported games which runs very well on FX hardware are still in ps1.1, which are still simple and does not have performance issues with the FX series. Of course, you can blame developers for not developing simple shaders as well [Btw, if this generation can not run the game very well when ps2.0 shaders are used, why even bother to design the engine such that AA can work correctly on those]

And about the AA issue.. It is not just about not favoring Nvidia.. They just state that current MSAA implementations generates artifacts in the way they use the textures, and ATI hardware has a workaround for this (which supports another type of MSAA), but is not exposed in ps2.0 specifications. In turns out that, this other type is not supported in Nvidia, and thats why it can not support it..

And do not buy the "most closest ps3.0 implementation" thing. If you check, you will see that ATI's radeon/radeon 8500-9200 are the most complete dx7 and dx8 part's, respectively, but every developer use the features nvidia supported in their respective generations (common denominator).. By releasing radeon9700 6 months earlier than Nvidia, ATI changes that in this generation.

For the future generation cards, R420/NV40, which seems to be compatible with ps3.0 spec, they have to support these AA modes anyway.. And these chips would be much faster than the current ones, so they can turn on the MSAA without loosing the performance.. So what is the big deal about this?

 

[RussSchultz]

ATI follows the dx9 spec more closely...nvidia

Why do you keep saying that? By what metric do you measure this?

I did leave out the "and optimally" part, because that is arguably true. But I'm not sure what brings you to continually assert that one vendor follows the DX spec closer than another--when they're both certified.

 

[Ilfirin]

nVidia's lack of floating point render targets, and multiple render targets classifies as reasons for me, even if they aren't technically required by the spec.

[edit] Nevermind

 

[Althornin]

vrecan, you seem very credible technically until you state that ati has the greatest installed dx9 base, thats not true at all.

ati sold approx 1.3-1.5m R3xxx parts. Sales have slowed dramatically the last qtr as they had planned to go wide with rv350 (9600) but issues with the move 0.13u have prevented that happening. In fact rv350 is so bust that this has caused the move to r360 (for a speed boost) and rv360 to fix some metal layer issues.

ati has done well with some oems with the 9200 but as we both know thats dx8. One wonders what will happen to those sales if nvidia were to suddenly make an aggressive price move.

On the other hand nvidia is reputedly selling millions of its geforcefx range inc both the 5200, 5600 and 5900. We can assume that most of these are 5200 and 5600 which you may not like but it does mean that nvidia is setting the pace for dx9 and not ati.

http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20030428.watii428/BNStory/Technology/

This looks like valves problem more than nvidia's.

i fail to see how your linked story backs up your claim that nVidia is leading the DX9 marketshare.
In fact, its supports the opposite, because it states that in the DESKTOP market, ATI has gained two percentage points, while nVidia has lost one.
This means ATI is selling more cards than nVidia...so i fail to understand your conclusion.

 

[Grall]

However, for those of us who want the best possible experience... Valve obviously should have avoided using any techniques that were going to be this problematic.

Huh? I fail to see how all this is Valve's fault. They tried to find a way around the issue of boringly repeated textures, that DX9 and some particular pieces of hardware have issues that combine to cause trouble isn't really anything you can blame them for.

Valve must first have noticed this issue last Summer, and asked ATI about it. So why are we still hearing "there *might* be a workaround added to ATI's drivers"?

*Might*, because DX9 in its current implementation lacks a mechanism to selectively request the kind of edge texture sampling needed to deal with the problematic situation. It's either one form or the other, both of which can cause complications in some situations according to what I read so far.

*G*