The first HL2 benchmarks are out. Seems like ATI > Nivida on this one... Valve is having trouble just getting nVidia cards performing somewhat decently under DX9.

Here\'s what Anand Lal Shimpi says:
> Valve is pissed at all of the benchmarking "optimizations" they\'ve seen in the hardware community;
> Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA\'s architecture perform reasonably under the game;
> Valve recommends running geforce fx 5200 and 5600 cards in dx8 mode in order to get playable frame rates.
- even with the special NV3x codepath, ATI is the clear performance leader under Half-Life 2 with the Radeon 9800 Pro hitting around 60 fps at 10x7. The 5900 ultra is noticeably slower with the special codepath and is horrendously slower under the default dx9 codepath;
- the Radeon 9600 Pro performs very well - it is a good competitor of the 5900 ultra;
> ATI didn\'t need these special optimizations to perform well and Valve insists that they have not optimized the game specifically for any vendor.