FSAA Shots

All screenshots were taken on a Voodoo5 5500 at 800x600 resolution. This page may take some time to load depending on your connection, but if you're a hardcore CS player (or just a little curious about it) you've gotta see the 4X screenshots!

Counterstrike: FSAA disabled

I'm going in!

Ugly jaggies

That looks painful

Owned!

Firefight

More jaggies

Counterstrike (and Half-Life in general) is a game that really benefits from FSAA. The screenshots only offer a glimpse at just how sweet Counterstrike can look with FSAA enabled, check them out:

Counterstrike: 2X FSAA

Smoother now

Attack!

2X is much better

GX-Azazel owned somebody!

Still a few jaggies

Hurry up!

2X FSAA offers a marginal improvement over the standard, jagged graphics in Counterstrike. As the screenshots show, the jaggies don't disappear, but they're smoothed out fairly well. The performance hit is pretty insignificant as well.

Counterstrike: 4X FSAA

Headache

Going in for the kill

Classic ambush

4X looks so sweet!

Hallway of death

Mmm...firepower

Lookin' good

VIP escapes!

Once you've experienced 4X FSAA in Counterstrike, it's really hard to go back to anything less. The framerates ranged from around 26-50fps, with the average being somewhere in the mid-thirties. Unlike Quake3, where 100fps is ideal, 40-70fps is a pretty good sweet spot for Counterstrike.

The game was very playable at 800x600 under our test conditions, (on a Pentium III 700MHz system) but for competitive play 640x480 would probably be more ideal.