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

Interesting Results

[whataboutMike]

Interesting results. The 6800 Ultra and GT take top in almost all the tests. I was expecting the X800 to preform a little better on Source.

Re:Interesting Results

[Ford Prefect]

People seem to reckon there's some evil conspiracy between ATI and Valve - while ATI has definitely helped Valve in various ways, it really doesn't sound like Valve has deliberately crippled performance of the Source engine if an Nvidia card is present.

Guess what brand of video cards the map designers for Half-Life 2 used?

I think it was just the bells-and-whistles DX9 stuff which was the major problem, and Nvidia's latest cards seem to have that sorted. I know what brand of card I'm getting next - the one with decent Linux drivers as well!

Fails to answer my question

[Prien715]

Even the lowest end card they tested was playable in most every resolution. What I want to know is whether I need a new GFX card for HL:Source at all.

What's the lowest level card you can play with and still get a decent gameplay experience for those of us without $300 to spend on a card that'll be obsolete in 2 years?

Rant of an NVIDIA fanboy

[spuzzzzzzz]

Nvidia seems to have thoroughly recovered from their 5xxx series. With doom3 and HL2 performing better on a 6800 than X800 there isn't much reason to buy an ATI card right now. Especially with the GNU/Linux driver issue.

I'll have a good laugh at the HL2 fanboy that mocked me for getting a 6800GT, saying that HL2 is going to be so much better than doom3 that we should all run out and get ATI cards.