Valve lets off steam over NVIDIA performance …and offers a new graphics benchmark – very interesting, ATI appears to kick NV3x ass in DX9 performance

See also: Gabe Newell Interview @ Gamers Depo

The next generation will basically bring the pixel and vertex shader flexibility to geometry, we’ll have many more passes per scene, and each pass will be doing more interesting stuff. We’ll be doing lots of image post-processing, we probably will do deferred rendering to some degree, and we’ll be doing tone mapping. Motion blur and depth of field will be used by lots of applications. Real-time radiosity may or may not be happening in this time frame. If we’re right about this, then Source should be a very good engine for taking advantage of these functions.