Interesting thread over at [H] about HL2 & nVidia cards

[Huge]

Half Life 2 Coded Against NVIDIA?
This thread in our forum alleges that HL2 is coded to not allow some of NVIDIA's hardware to perform as well as it could. Now as forum threads go, we see a lot of things alleged, but if you are using a last-gen NVIDIA GPU video card, you might give this "fix" a try and see what happens. We have requests into ATI and NVIDIA for their thoughts on this. Valve only sends us form letters now days...

"Again, using 3dAnalyze you can test this. 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."

http://www.hardforum.com/showthread....0&page=1&pp=20

[Todd a]

It's pretty funny to actually read through. There are some paranoid people out there for sure. I read 9 pages yesterday when I found a link to it on the [H]ardOCP front page (news links). About halfway through that page someone pointed out something like 159 posts, veiwed 9000 times and no benchmarks.

All games have glitches and flaws and recoding thosands of textures to specify weither they can be veiwed under partial pressision is a waste of the programmers time. The game runs good on almost all hardware and the fact that it recommends DX8.1 instead of 9.0 for FX cards is not a big deal. Patches will follow. They say the game is heavily optimised for ATI,but they use the same paths pretty much and most of the griping ONLY effects the FX cards. They say that is only about 2.5% of the user base for HL2 that have FX cards fast enough to run DX9. There are more FX 5200 than all other FX cards and a good chunk of nVidia's HL2 player actually use Geforce4 MX 440 cards. To worry about such a small user base when the game was already so far behind schedual is pointless.

Then they say Doom3 is not uptimised as they use the same path, but the FX cards can do things like 0 persision.