Valve Cheating with ATI?
It has always been suspected that Valve has been to “bed” with ATI regarding Half-Life 2. ATI’s cards have generally kicked ass in the Source Engine. Could the reason for this be deliberate? This thread over at Hard OCP’s Hard Forum thinks so.
First off, you need 3dAnalyze. I’m assuming everyone knows that you can force HL2 to run in DX9 mode on FX cards, right? Only, you get artifacts in the water and other areas? Well, that’s pretty easy to fix. Just have the 3dAnalyze util report your card as an ATI Radeon instead of a GeForce FX. *taddah* All the artifacts go away, and you get true DX9 reflections!
…using 3dAnalyze…It is capable of forcing a card to use only FP16 shaders no matter what is requested. You’ll see no image quality difference doing that - just a HUGE performance boost. Why? Well, because while FP16 is all that Half-Life 2 *needs*, if they let the GeForce FX cards do THAT, they might have been competitive! So, instead, they forced FP24 (unneeded), which caused the GF-FX cards to render the DX9 mode in FP32 all the time. With the obvious associated performance hit.
