HardwareOC Half-Life 2 Benchmark

[Sazar]

btw did you notice that when you played hl2 after running this benchmark tool, it seems to stick the settings used in the benchmark in-game?

I had been playing 12x10 res maxed out, but when I went back in to play hl2 it was playing @ 16x12 4x/8x and it was playing surprisingly smoothly...

a pleasant surprise and now I am just leaving it at this setting... am currently playing through the beach level (hello antlions, nice to see you too)

[Clay]

:D Yeah I noticed that. I believe that HL2 will use the last settings for res, AA and AF if you don't specify otherwise.

[Clay]

Another thing I just noticed is that when I bench in HL2 manually now I run a timedemo one time through and ignore it, then I run three more times and average as usual. That first time through it is very choppy but the subsequent runs are much smoother and a good 10-15fps higher. This is at 1600x1200 4xAA/8xAF. This benchmark utility quits HL2 after just one run, that could be the problem. Not sure if there's a way to set it up to loop the timedemo multiple times or not, checking.

[Clay]

Well I've been working on this some more and have created some of my own timedemos. While recording my own timedemos they gameplay is very smooth, good framerates, no prooblems. However, when I go to play one of my timedemos I get the same stuttering and poor fps. So, this problem I'm having doesn't appear to be specific to this HardwareOC benchmark utility. I'm going to start a separate thread in this benchmarking forum now.

[MUYA]

optimizations on or off guys?

[MUYA]

Resolution: 1024×768
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 512 MB
Score = 86.9 FPS


Resolution: 1280×1024
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 512 MB
Score = 76.1 FPS


alll opts off

Image settings -HIGH

[Clay]

optimizations on or off guys?
I had left the optimizations at their defaults.

[MUYA]

Resolution: 1024×768
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 512 MB
Score = 88.2 FPS


Resolution: 1280×1024
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 512 MB
Score = 86.5 FPS


Anisotropic sample, Anisotropic mip filter, Trilinear optimizations - All on!

Image settings - Quality

[Lars]

Well. I did a littl4e testing with default speed on the x800xt pe. It seems that performance is up now with newer drivers and game updates. Maybe heapsize finally works, who knows. Here's what I get.

Drivers set to "Let application decide":

Resolution: 1600×1200
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 1024 MB
Score = 95.0 FPS

Resolution: 1600×1200
Demo: HardwareOC - d3c171
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 1024 MB
Score = 62.3 FPS

Drivers set to force 4x fsaa and 8x af :

Resolution: 1600×1200
Demo: HardwareOC - Coast
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 1024 MB
Score = 94.5 FPS

Resolution: 1600×1200
Demo: HardwareOC - d3c171
Detail: Maximum quality
Antialising mode: 4×
Filtering mode: Anisotropic 8×
Hardware DirectX level: DirectX 9
Heapsize: 1024 MB
Score = 60.8 FPS

There is a small difference, but nothing big. I'll try running the timedemos from the console and see if it makes any difference. Didn't really notice any stuttering, at least not as bad as one gets with Doom 3 anyway.

[Lars]

Ok, this is odd. When I run the same 2 benchmarks as above through the console, I get some erratic results/behaviour. Here is what happened.

I overclocked my gfx card to see if it would make any difference, and also to se how they were compared to my intial tests at the start of this thread. With the card clocked @ 600/590, running the same 2 benchmarks as above through the HOC program, I got 96.8 fps (up from 95.0 with no oc on the videocard) in the HOC coast demo, and 65.1 fps in d3c171 (up from 62.3 with no videocard oc). It'a about as I expected as the memory on the videocard doesn't clock very much.

No running the benchmarks again through the console (keeping the card @ 600/590) gives me this (a little cut'n'paste from the sourcebench.txt file)

Coast:

hoc_coast1.dem, 111.2, 8.1, 24.4,1600,1200,2714
hoc_coast1.dem, 112.2, 7.4, 24.2,1600,1200,2714
hoc_coast1.dem, 111.6, 7.4, 24.3,1600,1200,2714
hoc_coast1.dem, 111.9, 7.4, 24.3,1600,1200,2714

As you can see I did 4 runs and the coast benchmark consistently shows more fps through the console. So I'm up from 96.8 to 111-112 fps.... And this time the sound was "on", whereas I didn't hear any sound when I was benching using the HOC utility.

Running the d3c171 demo through the console resulted in HL2 exiting to the desktop every time I ran it.... Results were almost identical to using the HOC utility though.

d3c171.dem, 64.2, 5.9, 30.3,1600,1200,1943
d3c171.dem, 63.8, 5.8, 30.5,1600,1200,1943

So it's 64 fps vs. 65 using the utility. Also here I had sound "on" running it through the console.

It appears that there is some discrepancy with either this utility or benchmarking HL2 altogether.... :confused:

[Clay]

It appears that there is some discrepancy with either this utility or benchmarking HL2 altogether.... :confused:
Thanks for all of the feedback Lars. :thumbsup: But yes, it seems that we're all seeing some odd results in some capacity. I've just thrown my hands in the air for now in my attempts to bench HL2. There must be some simple/well-known answer to this but I've yet to find it in the forums or Googling around.