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Counter-Strike: Source Beta Performance August 20, 2004 |
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Summary: Do you love playing Counter-Strike but you're tired of its outdated graphics? Then Counter-Strike: Source is for you! Take the same popular game and give it a fresh coat of paint with one of the most advanced game engines out there and you have the basics of what CS: Source is all about. But which card performs best with the CS: Source beta -- ATI or NVIDIA, and how much of an impact does having a 256MB graphics card bring? See those answers, as well as more 2048x1536 benchmarks in this article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 7 ) |
CS: Source Benchmarking Impressions
While we posted our results with Valve’s stress test first, the release of the Counter-Strike: Source beta was definitely more important. Counter-Strike is the #1 shooter played online, with a loyal following of tens of thousands of gamers. In fact, with the standalone copy of the original Counter-Strike a perennial bestseller, it could easily be argued that Counter-Strike: Source is just as big, if not bigger, than the release of Half-Life 2 and DOOM 3! It may not be getting the fanfare of the other two, but it goes without saying that the release of Counter-Strike: Source will be highly anticipated by a lot of people. Because of this, we’ll probably be dedicating separate sections for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source in future hardware reviews. Until that occurs however, we’ll have to settle with benchmarking CS: Source beta.
Benchmarking the beta
Valve has implemented everything you’ll need for benchmarking and recording your own demos in CS: Source, only it’s a little harder to find. The console is disabled by default, so you’ll have to enable it by checking the "Enable developer console" setting under the keyboard - advanced menu. In addition, the beta doesn’t ship with any demos, but this can be easily rectified with the “record” command. We’re currently providing our own demo, cssource_firingsquad.dem, which you can use for benchmarking your own hardware.
In order to run our demo, place the cssource_firingsquad.dem file in your "\\counter-strike source beta\\cstrike" directory, then launch the game. Once you’ve enabled the console, lower it with the tilde (~) key and type "timedemo cssource_firingsquad". Press enter and CS: Source will then run the demo and give you your fps result.
The cards
For this article, we’ve decided to focus on the high-end DX9 cards first, we’ll be taking a look at the first and second generation DX9 cards in our next article. After posting the video stress test results, we were particularly interested in seeing 128MB versus 256MB numbers, so we included ASUS’ V9999 Gamer Edition card.
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This is a GeForce 6800 board that ships with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, which runs at 1.0GHz. For the purposes of these tests though we underclocked the memory to 700MHz, the default setting for GeForce 6800.
On the extreme high-end side, we also included eVGA’s e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition. For the Extreme Editions, eVGA handpicks the fastest 6800 Ultra cards and overclocks them by default. All cards are validated and guaranteed to run at 450MHz core/1.2GHz memory, which is an improvement of 50MHz on the graphics core and 100MHz (effective) on the memory. This makes these boards some of the fastest GeForce 6800 Ultras on the planet.
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The only downside is that these cards are ultra rare. To date, eVGA has only sold 60 cards! At $550 a pop, these cards aren’t cheap, but when you consider all the goodies eVGA throws in (a $10 Starbucks coupon, $50 eVGA bucks, etc.) it’s actually not a bad deal, as a stock 6800 Ultra retails for $500 with lower performance.
Of course, all the performance in the world means nothing if CS: Source looks horrible on your $500 video card. To evaluate this we’ve taken some screenshots.
| Image quality | Page:: ( 2 / 7 ) |
While we couldn’t take 100% reproducible screens with the VST, that was no problem in CS: Source. First we’ll take a look at AA quality with ATI’s X800 XT Platinum Edition:
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GeForce 6800 Ultra:
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Notes
We’ve said this a few times before, and today we’ll say it again: NVIDIA has really raised the bar in their AA quality with the GeForce 6800 series. Looking at both vendors 4xAA mode, it’s difficult to give the edge to one or the other. Staircases are particularly notorious for their jaggies, with their long, flat lines and sharp edges, but both cards did a magnificent job of removing them. ATI still provides more modes, and an exotic, temporal AA feature, but judging purely from a quality standpoint, it’s hard to pick a winner here.
Anisotropic filtering
Filtering was one of those areas where card manufacturers used to cut corners in order to increase their performance, but with today’s latest cards that’s not as often the case. Sure, both ATI and NVIDIA’s latest drivers contain optimizations, but this isn’t a bad thing if done properly.
Like AA, we’ve had a more difficult time spotting differences between both card’s filtering quality – they’re both that good. At some angles X800 cards still have some problems, but we’ve found that these cases rarely crop up during gaming. The biggest issue instead that we’ve seen has been squashing driver bugs. This can vary from the obvious, such as the examples we provided with X800 cards in Far Cry 1.2, or the more subtle, like the shadow issues we showed with GeForce cards in our second Far Cry performance article.
Regardless, lets look at AF, starting first with X800 XT PE:
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And now the GeForce 6800 Ultra card
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Notes
Even when zoomed, textures along the walls and floors look good on both GeForce 6800 and X800 hardware. We’ve provided PNGs so you can look for yourself.
HDR lighting
One other area we wanted to briefly explore was high dynamic range lighting in CS: Source. Since ATI Shader Day we’ve been lusting to see it in action, and with the release of CS: Source beta it’s finally here! Feast your eyes on these screenshots fellow gamers:
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| System setup | Page:: ( 3 / 7 ) |
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
ASUS K8V Deluxe
1GB OCZ PC3200 EL Platinum Rev2
ATI RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition
ATI RADEON X800 PRO
CATALYST 4.8
ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition
eVGA e-GeForce 6800 Ultra Extreme Edition
Leadtek WinFast A400 GeForce 6800
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra reference card
PNY Verto GeForce 6800 GT
ForceWare 61.77
DirectX 9.0c
Windows XP with Service Pack 1
60GB Western Digital Special Edition with 8MB cache
Benchmarks
Counter-Strike: Source beta
| 2048x1536 benchmarks | Page:: ( 4 / 7 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Source 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 7 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
| Source Max AA/AF | Page:: ( 6 / 7 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source – Direct3D
Note: Keep in mind that the GeForce 6800 cards are running with 4xAA/16xAF in the graphs (their highest setting), we also included X800 scores with 6xAA/16xAF.
| Final Thoughts | Page:: ( 7 / 7 ) |
Looking over the benchmarks, the X800 PRO and X800 XT Platinum Edition’s decisive lead we saw in the video stress test has been wiped away in the beta release of Counter-Strike: Source. Keep in mind that we’re pumping significantly fewer shaders and bump/normal maps than in the video stress test, which could make it more of a shader performance test than an indicator of performance with the final release of Half-Life 2.
We won’t truly know the answer to this question until Half-Life 2 is released, but at least in Counter-Strike: Source, it looks like both ATI and NVIDIA’s latest hardware provide very similar levels of performance. With the exception of 2048x1536, the GeForce 6800 GT sweeps the X800 PRO in 4xAA/8xAF and 4xAA/16xAF testing. At 2048x1536 driver limitations are likely playing a role in holding back the GT and Ultra cards. The GeForce 6800 Ultra and X800 XT Platinum Edition are neck and neck in most of our benchmarks below 2048x1536, with the 6800 Ultra taking the crown until you get to 1600x1200. Gamers with either card should be pleased with the performance of their hardware.
Another aspect that really jumps out is the added performance 256MB cards such as the ASUS V9999 Gamer Edition provide. At 1280x1024 with 4xAA/8xAF the ASUS card ran 14% faster than the 128MB Leadtek GeForce 6800. The margin gets even wider at 1600x1200! For optimal gameplay performance, it really looks like you’ll want a 256MB card for Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2.
Now that we’ve seen what the latest high-end cards can do in CS: Source beta, we’ll next be taking a look at the previous generation of flagship cards. Valve has clearly spent a lot of time with NVIDIA optimizing the GeForce FX cards in the past year; we’ll see how they stack up to the RADEON 9800/9800 XT next!