Half Life 2 GPU Roundup Part 1 - DirectX 9 Shootout
 

When benchmarking Half Life 2 we discovered a few interesting things:

Half Life 2's performance is generally shader (GPU) limited when outdoors and CPU limited when indoors; now this rule of thumb will change if you run at unreasonably high resolutions (resolutions too high for your GPU) or if you have a particularly slow CPU/GPU, but for the most part take any of the present day GPUs we are comparing here today and you'll find the above statement to be true.

Using the flashlight can result in a decent performance hit if you are already running close to the maximum load of your GPU. The reason behind this is that the flashlight adds another set of per pixel lighting calculations to anything you point the light at, thus increasing the length of any shaders running at that time.

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2278&p=1

What happened to the giant lead of the Ati X800 cards compared with the Nvidia 6800 cards ??

it was only present in the ATI slides apparantly.

Driverheaven "claims" that they are the source? for the ATI slides

"over the last week" comment was posted on 16/11, HL2 was not released to media/public, so he had to do it at the Valve offices... which makes you wonder, of course.

here are their results http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/Half%20life%202/

which are exactly the same as the ATI slides, but presented in a more bandwidth consuming, slower and pointless flash animation.

notice that no test system details were mentioned. and the comments thread in their forums was closed and the last posts referring to real benchmarks by Anandtech/HardOCP removed.

sad.