Counter-Strike: Source Performance Explored

sand writes "While ATI has hooked up with Valve for Half-Life 2, a recent Firingsquad article gives the performance edge to NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 in Counter-Strike: Source. Six high-end cards are tested against CS:Source in four different maps under a wide variety of graphics settings with GeForce 6800 GT finishing ahead of X800 XT PE in some benchmarks."

Interesting Results

[whataboutMike]

Interesting results. The 6800 Ultra and GT take top in almost all the tests. I was expecting the X800 to preform a little better on Source.

Re:Interesting Results

[Ford Prefect]

People seem to reckon there's some evil conspiracy between ATI and Valve - while ATI has definitely helped Valve in various ways, it really doesn't sound like Valve has deliberately crippled performance of the Source engine if an Nvidia card is present.

Guess what brand of video cards the map designers for Half-Life 2 used? [hlfallout.net]

I think it was just the bells-and-whistles DX9 stuff which was the major problem, and Nvidia's latest cards seem to have that sorted. I know what brand of card I'm getting next - the o

Rant of an NVIDIA fanboy

[spuzzzzzzz]

Nvidia seems to have thoroughly recovered from their 5xxx series. With doom3 and HL2 performing better on a 6800 than X800 there isn't much reason to buy an ATI card right now. Especially with the GNU/Linux driver issue.

I'll have a good laugh at the HL2 fanboy that mocked me for getting a 6800GT, saying that HL2 is going to be so much better than doom3 that we should all run out and get ATI cards.

My heart goes out...

[Sevn]

To those that will kick themselves for spending 100 bucks more for the x800 over the 6800gt specifically for Valve products. Perhaps if you hurry, you can sell it on ebay for enough to get a 6800GT. On the bright side, I'm glad I waited. Kinda makes my next graphics card purchase decision very easy.

You sound like an nvidia fan boy.

[billybob]

I have a "measely" 9600 pro, and it handles CS Source beautifully. 1280x1024, graphics turned up all the way, and it is absolutely fine, in fact it's great, easily 60+ FPS. It's a beautiful engine, I cant wait for HL2 to come out, and am confident it will be JUST FINE THANK YOU VERY MUCH since it's the same engine. Even though obviously not all of the advanced features are being used in CS, most of those are CPU intensive anyways as opposed to graphics card. I'm thinking particularly of the physics engine h

Re:You sound like an nvidia fan boy.

[j.bellone]

If you're running in that resolution with that card then you definately don't have everything turned up. I have a 9800P 256mb, I'm running in 1024x768 with 6XAA and 8XAF and I pull an average of 80FPS. I get 91.3FPS on the video stress test.

Well...

[billybob]

my FPS could be higher than 60, I havent actually turned on that option to check. But I know that ~60FPS is where you stop being able to tell the diffrence between more FPS, eg its "damn smooth", I was just implying that on my system it is at at least this point. :) But, I also dont have AA or AF turned on.

Better to measure performance of binaries.

[Chelloveck]

Who cares about the performance of the Counter Strike source? It's the binaries that count, man!

Flashbang!

[bryhhh]

This image [firingsquad.com] showing the effect of a flashbang with the source engine, looks very much like one of the old 'wall hack' cheats.

Re:Flashbang!

[Anonymous Coward]

The new flashbang effect is hard to see in screenshots - When you get flashed, the screen goes white, then slowly fades out into an afterimage of what you were looking at when you got flashed. That slowly fades out until you can see what you're actually looking at.

Hard to describe, but it works really well in-game.

Re:Flashbang!

[Anonymous Coward]

New flashbangs are insane!!!!

A direct hit with it completely makes your screen white and makes a "ringing sound" from both of your "ears" (Game has directional sound)

As it fades you slowly loose the white and the ringing and you start seeing "Double"

A near miss or a flash from a long ways away will just make you see "double"

Very very sick.

Just a note though. So far I prefer the old CS by far. And REALLY enjoy the new models I got from buying CS:S. I personally am very disappointed in the CS:S play/

high-end cards

[Tibor the Hun]

So what you're telling me is that CS: Source plays well on high-end cards.
Would it have killed them to evaluate it on low-end cards, so that we can know if they'll be able to handle HL2?

Fails to answer my question

[Prien715]

Even the lowest end card they tested was playable in most every resolution. What I want to know is whether I need a new GFX card for HL:Source at all.

What's the lowest level card you can play with and still get a decent gameplay experience for those of us without $300 to spend on a card that'll be obsolete in 2 years?

Re:Fails to answer my question

[TellarHK]

I have no idea, everyone I know sold some blood or major organs in order to pick up at least a Radeon 9800 for this beast. We've been waiting forever for HL2, after all.

But seriously, everything I've read and heard leads me to believe that something as low as a GeForce 4 MX will be -playable- so long as your CPU isn't a total dog. And as far as CPU's go, I have a little personal anecdote on this matter myself.

My Athlon 2400+ XP burned out last night (One of the Thoroughbred-B cores) and so I was forced to slap in my old Athlon 1Ghz (Thunderbird) CPU in its place for the duration until FedEx brings me the new one I ordered today. After getting that chip in place, I loaded up the Video Stress Test from CS: Source and managed to get an almost-respectable 36 fps with the 1Ghz CPU, 1 gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9800. This was only 15 fps lower than the score I got with the 2400+. A significant hit for sure, but still playable. The video card was definitely doing the lion's share of the work, so I can't give all the credit to the processor, but I'm quite pleased to have taken a lower hit in performance than I expected. Valve's official minspec is 1.2Ghz and a DX7 card, so the range is going to be pretty broad.

For an absolute-minspec machine, I'd suggest a 1.2Ghz processor, a GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64M, 256M of RAM and enough hard drive to handle the install. That'd be playable in 800x600 I think.

Re:Fails to answer my question

[j.bellone]

I'd suggest the minimum specs, they seem to be placed well enough that it's probably the best playing performance you can get at a lower system. The 9800Pro performs more than well enough to run this game, I'm glad I picked one up for realtively cheap ($185 from Ajump when they were on sale).

I have a brand new rig though, so I haven't been able to test this game on anything other than my new AMD64. I also haven't tried any of my older nVIDIA cards lying around; maybe I'll throw them into the test system

Re:Fails to answer my question

[netfool]

This was taken from http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life2/ in the Mini FAQ, I don't know how up to date it is or where they got the info, so take it w/ a grain of salt:

"While the new engine has all sorts of fancy features, it's still designed to scale and work on lower-end machines.
Apparently a 700mhz processor and a video card capable of running DX6 is enough, although a 2ghz with a GeForce4 is recommended. Rumors about NVidia or ATI exclusivity are unfounded."

If that's true, that would be great. I don't need all the eye candy, just decent FPS and some good gameplay & I'll be happy 8^)
I hope DOD:Source is released sometime this year.

Re:Fails to answer my question

[masterQba]

in steam try to add "-dxlevel 81" or "-dxlevel 70" maybe even "-dxlevel 60" in cs:s launch options. the game starts looking like crap but the physics are still there so it's quite fun nonetheless.

Uh, and?

[pat_trick]

Well, after I RTFA, it seems to me that at most the performance difference is at most 11 FPS between the two high end products (6800 Ultra vs X800 XT PE). More often it was about 6-7 FPS difference between the two. Seems like nothing to get bent out of shape about.