UPDATED Half-Life 2: Episode 2 CPU and Graphics Performance
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Derek Wilson on October 12, 2007 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Final Words
With the low cost of CPUs these days and with many affordable GPUs on the market, building a system capable of playing Half Life 2: Episode Two just isn't that difficult.
On the CPU side we were caught off guard by exactly how much cache size impacted performance in Episode Two, rendering the Core 2 Duo E4000 and Pentium E2000 series processors much slower than their competition.
AMD was also far more competitive than expected, most likely as a result of the Source engine's dependence on low latency memory accesses. While Intel continues to hold the performance crown, in the $133 and lower price points AMD actually ends up being the better processor to have. If and when Phenom can get to those price points, AMD could actually end up being significantly more competitive than it has been since the launch of Core 2.
Given the performance impact we've seen from faster FSBs and larger caches however, Intel's Penryn core should do a good job of fixing lower end performance once Intel's 45nm core makes its way down to lower price points as well. It also remains to be seen how much of the cache sensitivity we saw here today will translate into other up and coming games, such as today's Unreal Engine 3 based UT3 demo.
While NVIDIA is the only solutions for those who wish to run Episode 2 with all the features enabled at 2560x1600 with 4xAA enabled, the 2900 XT does outperform the 8800 GTS at the $400 price point. The 8800 GTS 320MB is once again a huge value for the money as it performs almost identically to the 8800 GTS 640MB part (with the exception of anything above 1920x1200 with 4xAA which handicaps the lower memory card).
As we mentioned, almost anything can play Episode 2, but if you want high quality at 1280x1024, you'll at least need the equivalent performance of a modern $100+ graphics card. Serious (and even casual) PC gamers will very likely already have something that meets this requirement. Clearly this is no Crysis, but at the same time we applaud Valve's efforts to keep its engine up to date.
With the low cost of CPUs these days and with many affordable GPUs on the market, building a system capable of playing Half Life 2: Episode Two just isn't that difficult.
On the CPU side we were caught off guard by exactly how much cache size impacted performance in Episode Two, rendering the Core 2 Duo E4000 and Pentium E2000 series processors much slower than their competition.
AMD was also far more competitive than expected, most likely as a result of the Source engine's dependence on low latency memory accesses. While Intel continues to hold the performance crown, in the $133 and lower price points AMD actually ends up being the better processor to have. If and when Phenom can get to those price points, AMD could actually end up being significantly more competitive than it has been since the launch of Core 2.
Given the performance impact we've seen from faster FSBs and larger caches however, Intel's Penryn core should do a good job of fixing lower end performance once Intel's 45nm core makes its way down to lower price points as well. It also remains to be seen how much of the cache sensitivity we saw here today will translate into other up and coming games, such as today's Unreal Engine 3 based UT3 demo.
While NVIDIA is the only solutions for those who wish to run Episode 2 with all the features enabled at 2560x1600 with 4xAA enabled, the 2900 XT does outperform the 8800 GTS at the $400 price point. The 8800 GTS 320MB is once again a huge value for the money as it performs almost identically to the 8800 GTS 640MB part (with the exception of anything above 1920x1200 with 4xAA which handicaps the lower memory card).
As we mentioned, almost anything can play Episode 2, but if you want high quality at 1280x1024, you'll at least need the equivalent performance of a modern $100+ graphics card. Serious (and even casual) PC gamers will very likely already have something that meets this requirement. Clearly this is no Crysis, but at the same time we applaud Valve's efforts to keep its engine up to date.
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tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
I would also like to see tests on:* 1gb vs 2gb vs 4gb of ram
* WinXP vs Vista (maybe even 32bit vs 64bit OS comparisons)
* EP1 performance vs EP2 performace & CSS (or DODS) performancs VS TF2 performance.
tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
This article claims that the new engine only takes advantage of two cores. However, Valve's comments all suggest that the engine can take advantage of four or more cores.As for proof, this is what one of my co-workers from Valve's forums reports:
"How about this?!
http://i24.tinypic.com/rvefs6.png">http://i24.tinypic.com/rvefs6.png
I was in the level called "our mutual fiend" where you go down into the depths to find out what is going on. Multiple hunters and all kinds of activity going on. I'm going to run this same level with graphical settings all on low to eliminate GPU bottlenecks and set the core affinity for HL2 to use one, then two, then three and then four and record the fps in game."
ViRGE - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
I could be wrong here, but that doesn't indicate that HL2 is using all 4 cores. It could be bouncing processes between cores (which does happen with other applications), which makes it look like all 4 cores are in use.tonjohn - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
Here is the official official word on this topic:So AnAnd needs to adjust the article.
tonjohn - Monday, October 15, 2007 - link
The article still says that the new engine only supports two threads when that is actually wrong. Please fix this.FrankThoughts - Saturday, October 13, 2007 - link
I have several thoughts.First, the whole "30FPS is too slow" stuff is garbage. Maybe in multiplayer, but in single player HL2 Episode Two is perfectly good at 30-40 FPS. I say this because:
Second, I played through the WHOLE GAME at 2560x1600 4xAA with an X1900 XT GPU. (2GB of RAM, Athlon X2 4800+ CPU, Windows XP). I checked frame rates with FRAPS, and typically got anywhere from 30-45 FPS. What's odd is that I actually thought I was getting much higher rates and it was only after completing the game that I checked the real values and discovered I was hitting low to mid 20s at times.
Third, as usual CrossFire support is broken out of the box. Maybe the 7.10 drivers that just got released have fixed this, but those weren't available the day EP2 released and so I played and beat the game with a single GPU running. (CrossFire ran, but there was several graphical corruption and major slowdowns. Same goes for Portal. Not sure about TF2 yet....)
Fourth, CPU cores and performance scaling. Well, I may be doing something wrong (I've tried setting affinity in task manager as well as using "threads [x]" to set CPU core use to one or two cores. Other than minor variations of around .4 FPS (using a timedemo I created, since the AT demos apparently aren't available for download), I get the same result with one or two CPU cores. So, while the engine might be threaded to the point where it can "use" four or even eight cores, the reality is that it doesn't impact performance at all that I can see. Perhaps I'm GPU limited, but I was testing at 1280x800 and averaged 125 FPS (plus or minus 0.3 FPS) at every CPU threading level I tried. CPU usage still got up to around 60% max regardless, so I'm thinking either sound drivers or the graphics drivers are utilizing the other core. Bottom line is that best case (and not even likely) the multithreading is giving about a 5-10% performance boost. Usually threading has an overhead of 5-10%, so most likely CPU utilization went up but performance remained virtually unchanged.
If you have X1900 series hardware, this game runs perfectly well, turning in great performance even at insane 2560x1600 4xAA resolutions. (If I turn off AA, I get about 40% faster frame rates.) What's funny is that my performance seems to be within spitting distance of the 8800 GTS and HD 2900 XT, all on 22 month old old hardware. I've been thinking I "need" to upgrade for a long time, but every time I actually play some new title I end up with perfectly reasonable performance. My next upgrade will be quad core and either SLI or CrossFire (probably SLI since CrossFire has left me irritated on more than one occasion - basically every new game fails to run with CrossFire for anywhere from 1 to 4 months), but I'm not going to take the plunge until I actually feel the performance gain will be worthwhile. At the current rate, I might be sticking with DX9, XP, and X1900 until late 2008!
tonjohn - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
If you noticed how, prior to the alt-tabbing, the Core0 has high usage and then the other cores are all being used but the % varies with each core. This is a good indicator that the engine is actively taking advantage of each core and not simply the OS bouncing the supposed two threads around.More supporting evidence that the information in Anand's article is potentially incorrect:
From CSNation, http://www.csnation.net/articles.php/article_234/">http://www.csnation.net/articles.php/article_234/
steamsucks - Friday, October 12, 2007 - link
Steam sucks. You can't even dl the piece of crap game because of server issues. Don't buy this game, and don't support Valve/Steam.Zak - Sunday, November 11, 2007 - link
I never had any issues with Steam since HL2 release. I actually like the idea of not having to deal with copy-protected CDs and "please insert CD number 5" every time I want to play a game and having my games always updated. I buy a game in the evening and next day it's INSTALLED and ready on my hard drive. I can make fully re-installable backups of any Steam content on a hard drive so I don't have re-download the whole games when I need to reinstall. I only wish they discounted the Steam games more than the actual physical products. Other than that Steam is a great idea IMHO.Z.
sc3252 - Monday, October 15, 2007 - link
Steam does suck. I wish I didnt have to use steam to play orange box, but thats how things work. I dislike it but acknwolege its not as bad as bioshocks drm.The first thing I did when I bought this game was put it on a seperate account, so that my brother can play counter strike while I play team fortress 2.
As far as performance goes, I am gaming on a 3000+ amd 64 with a 7600gt. Everything plays perfectly at 1680x1050. I have aa turned off but everything else is turned up. I cant say the same for the ut3, or any other modern game that has graphics even close to half-life 2's level.