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3D Performance with Counter-Strike: Source Part 1 High-End Cards October 12, 2004 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Wondering whose graphics card currently delivers the best performance in Counter-Strike: Source? We're here today to find out! In today's article we've rounded up six of the latest high-end graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA, pitching them head-to-head against one another in a variety of maps and conditions. See which card comes out on top inside!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 15 ) |
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The premise is simple, take Gooseman’s brilliant creation in Counter-Strike and port it over to Valve’s newer Source engine, which will be used in Half-Life 2. This includes all the old maps from Counter-Strike, including classics such as de-dust and de-aztec as well the game’s weapons and accessories (excluding the riot shield, which was introduced with CS 1.6). Unfortunately, you don’t get to select your player model, for instance all counter-terrorists use the default Navy SEAL player model, but Valve has added extra touches to all of the maps, including props that will go flying if hit by a stray bullet or caught in the concussion of a fragmentation grenade. The end result is a highly polished reproduction of the original, only with much better visuals.
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With this in mind, we’ve rounded up the latest high-end video cards from ATI and NVIDIA, including the RADEON X800 XT, which was recently transformed from being a PCI Express-only product, into a PCI-Express/AGP card, just like the GeForce 6800 GT and RADEON X800 PRO. The RADEON X800 XT AGP features a 16-pixel pipeline architecture, just like the flagship RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition, only it’s clocked at 500MHz core/500MHz memory. X800 XT AGP cards have been shipping since mid-September, and are manufactured by both ATI and their board partners, with boards retailing for an MSRP of $450.
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To evaluate the performance of these cards in Counter-Strike, we made custom demos of online play in the maps Dust, Italy, Cobble, and Aztec. Cobble and Aztec feature larger outdoor environments, while Dust and Italy are tighter maps with intensive gameplay. Let’s get to the results!
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| Test systems | Page:: ( 2 / 15 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
Gigabyte K8NSNXP-939
1GB OCZ EL DDR400 Platinum Edition Rev 2
ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI RADEON X800 PRO
Sapphire RADEON X800 XT AGP
Driver version CATALYST 4.9
Leadtek WinFast A400 Ultra GeForce 6800 card
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT reference card
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card
Driver version 65.76
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Counter-Strike: Source
Model, Texture, Shader, Shadow, and Water Detail all set to High
Water Detail: World
| Cobble | Page:: ( 3 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Cobble 4xAA | Page:: ( 4 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Cobble 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Aztec | Page:: ( 6 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Aztec 4xAA | Page:: ( 7 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Aztec 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Dust | Page:: ( 9 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Dust 4xAA | Page:: ( 10 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Dust 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 11 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Italy | Page:: ( 12 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Italy 4xAA | Page:: ( 13 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Italy 4xAA/16xAF | Page:: ( 14 / 15 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 15 / 15 ) |
Based on our results with the final release of Counter-Strike: Source, all of the high-end 256MB graphics cards perform well in Counter-Strike: Source, gamers would likely be pleased with any one of these cards. GeForce 6800 cards take a much more significant performance hit than the other cards due to two factors: the card’s lack of memory bandwidth (the GeForce 6800’s memory is only clocked at 350MHz, a figure which matches GeForce FX 5900 XT) and its limited frame buffer, with CS: Source beta we noted a double-digit dip in performance for GeForce 6800 128MB at high resolutions. Fortunately it still performs well under less demanding environments.
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Another interesting observation that can be gathered from the performance results is NVIDIA’s performance under max video settings: you’ll note that the GeForce 6800 cards no longer take the larger performance hits we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in the past when anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering are both cranked up. In fact, their cards broke away from ATI under 4xAA/16xAF settings. Traditionally, this has been an area where ATI cards have held an advantage.
With this in mind we should note that we tested with ATI’s traditional CATALYST 4.9 release without the Control Center installed or ATI’s A.I. technology, which ATI plans to release later this month with improved Half-Life 2 performance. At the same time, multiple beta ForceWare 66 drivers have been leaked on the Internet with similar claims of offering improved D3D performance. In other words, the performance results we brought you today could be different in a matter of weeks, although by how much remains to be seen.
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In the meantime, NVIDIA’s high-end GeForce 6800 Ultra and 6800 GT currently hold the lead over ATI in our testing, although in Italy, we had a virtual tie at max settings, as the 6800 Ultra and X800 XT PE finished within 2% of each other, while the 6800 GT and X800 XT AGP were separated by a margin of just over 1%! That’s about as close as you can get folks.
With both ATI and NVIDIA’s cards performing so closely to one another in today's games, other aspects such as cooling and noise, driver quality, and arguably more importantly, price and availability will likely play the most important roles in determining which card you purchase. In the latter two areas, NVIDIA clearly has a decisive advantage over ATI, their X800 XT cards are still extremely difficult to find at retail months after launch, only the RADEON X800 PRO has shipped to retail in significant quantities. ATI needs to get their supply problems nailed down quickly if they want get this resolved before the crucial holiday buying season. For now we'll give this round to NVIDIA, but there's still one more Valve release that we're eagerly awaiting: Half-Life 2 itself.