GeForce FX and Half-Life 2 demand a downgrade?

Word over at Firing Squad is that Half-Life 2 may not play nice with the GeForce FX series of Nvidia cards. They do an exhaustive breakdown of the game and come to the conclusion that the game may default to DirectX 8, instead of DX9, which offers much more eye candy. These guys know their stuff, and give us visual proof, along with some number crunching. The issue is not only important to gamers, who want their expensive hardware to play as advertised, but it's also of concern to hardware reviewers. Now, sites like Firing Squad need to decide if they should reign in the Radeon cards' power to match the GeForce's. What is a fair benchmark, when one card is pushing more polys than the other? All in all, a disappointing find. And one we have not heard the last of.