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Counter-Strike: Source Beta Performance: Part 2 Mainstream Cards September 01, 2004 |
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Summary: With the high-end cards covered, it's now time to look at how the mainstream cards perform with Counter-Strike: Source beta. In this article, Brandon rounds up the latest $200 offerings from ATI and NVIDIA. Cards benchmarked include the RADEON 9800 PRO, 9600/9600 PRO/XT, 9500/9500 PRO and RADEON 8500 128MB, while the NVIDIA cards represented include the GeForce FX 5600/5600 Ultra, 5700/5700 Ultra, GeForce FX 5900 XT, GeForce4 Ti 4200/Ti 4600 and even GeForce3 64MB! See how all 15 cards stack up against each other in our latest article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 8 ) |
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:
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| System setup | Page:: ( 2 / 8 ) |
Intel Pentium 4 3.0CGHz
ABIT IC7-G MAX II Advance
1GB OCZ Technology EL PC3200 Platinum Revision 2
ATI RADEON 9800 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600 XT
ATI RADEON 9600 PRO
ATI RADEON 9600
ATI RADEON 9500 PRO
ATI RADEON 8500 128MB
Sapphire RADEON 9500
CATALYST 4.8
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5600 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5700
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5900 XT
MSI GeForce FX5600-VTDR128
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference card
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB reference card
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
| Counter-Strike: Source beta Performance | Page:: ( 3 / 8 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source beta – Direct3D
Notes
All of the cards represented here put up good numbers at low resolutions, including the GeForce3. In fact, frame rates are quite playable on most of these cards all the way up to 1024x768, and to a lesser extent 1280x1024! Let’s see how the cards separate once AA is turned on.
| 2xAA | Page:: ( 4 / 8 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source beta – Direct3D
| Counter-Strike: Source beta 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 8 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source beta – Direct3D
| Counter-Strike: Source beta 4xAA | Page:: ( 6 / 8 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source beta – Direct3D
| Counter-Strike: Source beta 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 7 / 8 ) |
Counter-Strike: Source beta – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 8 / 8 ) |
First of all, while we didn’t force the DX9 path on GeForce FX, or drop the DX9 RADEON cards down to DX8.0/DX8.1, we ran those numbers earlier this week and found that ATI has a considerable performance advantage over NVIDIA with these cards in both Counter-Strike: Source beta and the video stress test. So if we had to declare a pure performance winner, it would easily be the RADEON 9800 PRO, with the RADEON 9500 PRO and RADEON 9600 XT competing closely for second. This must come as sore news for GeForce FX 5900 series card owners.
Fortunately, Valve’s DX8.0 and DX8.1 paths look very similar to the DX9 path, and here the GeForce FX cards deliver very playable frame rates. Due to its 4x2 pipeline architecture and 256-bit memory interface, the GeForce FX 5900 XT is able to deliver considerably more performance than GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. Once you crank up the screen resolution and turn on the AA and AF, the difference can range anywhere from 20-30%, depending on the settings used.
Thanks to their impressive memory bandwidth and fill rate figures, the GeForce4 boards put up fairly good numbers considering their age, even when 4xAA is used with low resolutions, but lacks the advanced color, z-compression, and filtering algorithms found in GeForce FX and other DX9 cards. As a result, GeForce4 uses its available memory bandwidth less efficiently, resulting in huge performance drop offs once anisotropic filtering is used in concert with anti-aliasing. RADEON 8500 also puts up respectable numbers as long as you keep the AA and screen resolutions in check.
Of course, keep in mind that both ATI and NVIDIA are set to release a new wave of mainstream cards in the coming weeks. This means price cuts on existing cards (before they begin to disappear) and new performance levels for the mainstream segment. Hopefully AGP versions of these cards will begin to hit shelves right around the same time as Half-Life 2, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
In the meantime, it’s refreshing to see how well Valve’s Source engine scales with older hardware. With dedicated DX8.1, DX8.0, and DX7 paths (among others) Valve has done their best to custom tailor Half-Life 2 to deliver playable performance, even with less powerful graphics cards. You may not get all the eye candy of the DX9 path, but in the case of DX8 and even more so with DX8.1, the visuals come pretty close. Based on the numbers and screenshots we’ve provided over the past week, it could even be argued that Half-Life 2 scales better with a wider variety of hardware than DOOM 3.