GeForce FX and DirectX 9 Half-Life 2 Performance

Counter-Strike screenshots

Shadows

The first aspect we wanted to explore in Counter-Strike: Source are the soft shadows supported in the DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9 paths. If you recall the chart on page 1, shadows in the DX8.1 and DX9 paths are supersampled to give them softer edges than DX8.0 shadows. Dust isn’t the best map for this, but we were still able to find a good test sample:

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.0 path

5950 Ultra DX8.1 path

DX9 path with 5950 Ultra

RADEON 9800 XT DX8.0 path

9800 XT DX8.1 path

9800 XT DX 9.0 path. See the softer shadow?

Although this is a pretty simple test case, it isn’t hard to see the softer shadow cast on the terrorist in this batch of screenshots with the DX8.1 and DX9 paths on both ATI and NVIDIA hardware:

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.0

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.1

Displacement maps

We provided screenshots of the full resolution displacement maps in the video stress test screenshots on the previous page, but we wanted to explore the topic again in Counter-Strike: Source. Our next test area comes from outside the middle area in dust:

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.1

5950 Ultra DX9

RADEON 9800 XT DX8.1

9800 XT DX9

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.1

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX9

9800 XT DirectX 8.1

9800 XT DirectX 9

The output of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and RADEON 9800 XT looks pretty similar in both the DirectX 8.1 and DirectX 9 paths; spotting one card from another would be difficult if we removed the captions from the screenshots:

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX8.1

RADEON 9800 XT DX8.1

GeForce FX 5950 Ultra DX9

RADEON 9800 XT DX9

Based on the screenshots we’ve collected, we’re 100% confident that the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra is indeed running Source’s DX9 path. But before we get into the performance comparison, we took a few miscellaneous screenshots in dust: