Gamers Depot has a story up, offering some performance/price comparisons for Half-Life 2 tested with several different ATI and NVidia cards. There's also
a Q&A with Gabe Newell about DirectX and technology related subjects.
AnandTech has a quick story with a few notes on performance as well.
- Half-Life 2 has a special NV3x codepath that was necessary to make NVIDIA's architecture perform reasonably under the game;
- 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;
Update: another article
is available at Tech Report.