Counter-Strike: Source Performance Explored

sand writes "While ATI has hooked up with Valve for Half-Life 2, a recent Firingsquad article gives the performance edge to NVIDIA's GeForce 6800 in Counter-Strike: Source. Six high-end cards are tested against CS:Source in four different maps under a wide variety of graphics settings with GeForce 6800 GT finishing ahead of X800 XT PE in some benchmarks."

Comments

Re:Flashbang!

[Anonymous Coward]

The new flashbang effect is hard to see in screenshots - When you get flashed, the screen goes white, then slowly fades out into an afterimage of what you were looking at when you got flashed. That slowly fades out until you can see what you're actually looking at.

Hard to describe, but it works really well in-game.

Re:Fails to answer my question

[TellarHK]

I have no idea, everyone I know sold some blood or major organs in order to pick up at least a Radeon 9800 for this beast. We've been waiting forever for HL2, after all.

But seriously, everything I've read and heard leads me to believe that something as low as a GeForce 4 MX will be -playable- so long as your CPU isn't a total dog. And as far as CPU's go, I have a little personal anecdote on this matter myself.

My Athlon 2400+ XP burned out last night (One of the Thoroughbred-B cores) and so I was forced to slap in my old Athlon 1Ghz (Thunderbird) CPU in its place for the duration until FedEx brings me the new one I ordered today. After getting that chip in place, I loaded up the Video Stress Test from CS: Source and managed to get an almost-respectable 36 fps with the 1Ghz CPU, 1 gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9800. This was only 15 fps lower than the score I got with the 2400+. A significant hit for sure, but still playable. The video card was definitely doing the lion's share of the work, so I can't give all the credit to the processor, but I'm quite pleased to have taken a lower hit in performance than I expected. Valve's official minspec is 1.2Ghz and a DX7 card, so the range is going to be pretty broad.

For an absolute-minspec machine, I'd suggest a 1.2Ghz processor, a GeForce 4 MX 440 with 64M, 256M of RAM and enough hard drive to handle the install. That'd be playable in 800x600 I think.

Re:Fails to answer my question

[netfool]

This was taken from http://www.planethalflife.com/half-life2/ in the Mini FAQ, I don't know how up to date it is or where they got the info, so take it w/ a grain of salt:

"While the new engine has all sorts of fancy features, it's still designed to scale and work on lower-end machines.
Apparently a 700mhz processor and a video card capable of running DX6 is enough, although a 2ghz with a GeForce4 is recommended. Rumors about NVidia or ATI exclusivity are unfounded."

If that's true, that would be great. I don't need all the eye candy, just decent FPS and some good gameplay & I'll be happy 8^)
I hope DOD:Source is released sometime this year.