Conclusion

Making conclusion for the final version of the Counter Strike: Source is a pretty easy task. If you are choosing a graphics card to play with or without eye-candy in typical resolutions, everything that is as fast as the RADEON 9800 PRO/RADEON 9800 XT or faster will meet your requirements.

Source physics engine requires quite a lot of CPU power and it looks like you definitely should have a powerful system to play the Counter Strike: Source without lags.

At this time we cannot find any clear leader among the high-end graphics cards. ATI’s RADEON X800 XT-series delivers extreme performance in cases where rapid pixel shaders are required. Though, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra and GT parts leave ATI’s RADEON X800-series behind once there is a higher load on texturing. Additionally, NVIDIA’s ForceWare drivers at this point seem to be better polished for the Counter Strike: Source, as systems based on NVIDIA’s GeForce 6 GPUs deliver a bit higher results in cases when performance depends on drivers and/or central processing unit’s speed.

ATI’s RADEON 9500 PRO is clearly faster than graphics cards like RADEON 9600 XT, however, it is not a fact that you will find its performance enough to play Counter Strike: Source. Still, the GeForce FX-series that renders the game in DirectX 8.1 or 8.0 mode is behind ATI’s RADEON products, which is why it is hard to recommend such graphics cards for the Counter Strike: Source.

Unfortunately, current drivers from ATI and NVIDIA are beta, which is why the final words on the performance of modern graphics boards in Counter Strike: Source are to be said in future.

Please keep in mind that Half-Life 2 performance may differ from what we see with the Counter Strike: Source.