Counter-Strike: Source Beta Performance: Part 2 Mainstream Cards

Introduction

Now that we’ve examined Counter-Strike: Source’s performance with high-end cards like the GeForce 6800 GT and RADEON X800 PRO, and investigated Half-Life 2’s rendering paths in our GeForce FX DirectX 9 Performance article, we’re now ready to take a look at performance with today’s mainstream cards. With their reduced performance figures, these cards may not be as sexy to write about, but with their sub-$200 price points, these cards ship in significantly greater volumes, making them relevant to a wide variety of gamers.

Arguably most popular among all these cards is GeForce4 Ti 4200. The Ti 4200 combined the 4x2 DX8 architecture of the more expensive GeForce4 Ti 4600 with a retail price of $199 when it was introduced two years ago. This allowed it to perform well ahead of anything else on the market at the time. And while it wasn’t exactly a “mainstream” card when it was announced, we’ve also included GeForce4 Ti 4600 in this roundup for good measure.

In a similar gesture, we also managed to dig up an old GeForce3 card. As the world’s first DirectX 8 accelerator, GeForce3 was at one time a technological marvel, but its high price kept it out of reach of most gamers until GeForce3 Ti 200 was introduced. These cards were quickly forgotten once GeForce4 was introduced. With only one vertex shader and lower clocks (GeForce3 Ti 500 topped out at 240MHz core/500MHz (effective) memory), even the fastest GeForce3 Ti 500 couldn’t keep up with the slowest GeForce4 Ti card in most situations.

Besides these oldies but goodies, we’ve included NVIDIA’s current mainstream offerings, which include GeForce FX 5600 and 5600 Ultra, GeForce FX 5700 and 5700 Ultra, and GeForce FX 5900 XT.

For benchmarking these cards we decided to stick with their default settings, which means the FX 5600s and 5700s were running Counter-Strike: Source beta’s DirectX 8.0 path, while the GeForce FX 5900 XT ran under DirectX 8.1. We considered forcing the cards to run DirectX 9, but as you saw in our GeForce FX DirectX 9 performance article, frame rates currently take a huge nose dive in CS: Source beta once DX9 is enabled. Considering how close the DirectX 8.0 and DirectX 8.1 paths look to DirectX 9, we’re fairly certain that the vast majority of GeForce FX card owners will want to run under the default paths Valve has specified. And besides, many of you said you preferred the bumpier look of displacement maps in Valve’s DX8/DX8.1 paths over DX9 in the article comments section. You’ll still miss out on the enhanced water found under DX9, but the de-dust map we benchmarked the cards in lacks water anyway.

From the ATI camp, we’ve gone through the archives and scoured up a RADEON 8500 128MB. RADEON 8500 was the world’s first DirectX 8.1 graphics card, with support for 1.4 pixel shaders. This gave it a technological edge over GeForce3, but its Achilles Heel was anti-aliasing performance. Its supersampling looked good, but sucked up practically all of the RADEON 8500’s memory bandwidth at high resolutions and/or when higher modes were used. Many RADEON 8500 users left it off. We played a little bit of CS: Source beta last night with the RADEON 8500 128MB and were able to get pretty decent frame rates as long as we stuck to low resolutions and kept the AA at 2x.

On the newer end of the spectrum, we’ve also included ATI’s RADEON 9500 and popular, and still admired RADEON 9500 PRO, RADEON 9600 and 9600 PRO, RADEON 9600 XT, and the newest entrant in the mainstream segment: RADEON 9800 PRO 128MB. Even retail outlets such as Fry’s have been selling these cards for $199 (or less) for over a month now.

We used the following settings in all testing:

Model Detail: High
Texture Detail: High
Water Detail: No Reflections
Shadow Detail: High
Vsync: Disabled
Between resolution changes, CS: Source beta was also restarted

Before we get started with the numbers, we also took a few comparison screenshots with the cards running with AA/AF: