X-bit labs

Counter Strike: Source: Performance Preview (page 7)

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Alexey Stepin

[ 08/20/2004 | 11:50 AM ]

Half-Life 2/Counter Strike: Source Hardware Stress Test, Eye-Candy Mode

Eye-candy mode gives a clear sign to the RADEON X800 PRO and the GeForce 6800: 16 pixel pipelines is not a luxury, but something that high-end graphics cards must have these days. Additionally, the power of the GeForce 6800 seems to be limited by memory bandwidth and size.

Eye-candy mode gives a clear sign to the RADEON X800 PRO and the GeForce 6800: 16 pixel pipelines is not a luxury, but something that high-end graphics cards must have these days. Additionally, the power of the GeForce 6800 seems to be limited by memory bandwidth and size. In fact, the video stress test just loves framerate and additional rendering pipelines and high-speed memory, just notice huge difference between performance of the RADEON 9600- and RADEON 9800-series.

ATI RADEON X800 XT is the leader in both eye-candy and pure speed modes, while the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GeForce 6800 GT get the No.2 and No.3 spots respectively. RADEON X800 PRO is pretty far behind the leaders, though, it still delivers decent framerate. For an unknown reason the RADEON 9800 PRO with 256MB of memory appeared to be a bit faster than the RADEON 9800 XT.

While the GeForce FX graphics cards work using DirectX 8.x render path, in “eye-candy” mode they deliver nice image quality and good performance that is inline or higher compared to ATI’s RADEON 9xxx series.