X-bit labs

Half the Way to the Half-Life 2: Counter Strike: Source Benchmarked (page 5)

Category: Video

by Anton Shilov Alexey Stepin, Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 10/10/2004 | 11:00 AM ]

Performance

Chateau Level, Pure Mode

There are ruins of a French mid-age castle in the Chateau level. As a terrorist runs to the ruins, he shoots into the water, which puts extreme load on pixel shader units of the VPU. As he rushes into the castle, he begins to drop various grenades, which also brings some other pixel shading effects. At the end, he plants a bomb and explodes with it.

The demo is not really game-like, as we had no opponents here.

In low resolutions, such as 1024x768 it seems that almost any graphics card, even a low-end, such as the RADEON X300 SE, is likely to deliver enough speed for the Counter Strike: Source. Please pay attention that the GeForce FX boards work in DirectX 8.0 or DirectX 8.1 modes, which does not produce the same image quality as the DirectX 9.0 mode utilized by all the RADEON graphics cards in the test along with the GeForce 6-series.

Even though the results of all high-end graphics cards of today are very high across all resolutions, the GeForce 6800 Ultra and GT parts manage to leave the RADEON X800 parts behind in 1024x768 as well as 1280x1024. In 1600x1200, however, ATI’s RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition takes the lead, but did not outpace the GeForce 6800 Ultra by a significant margin.

Due to the similarity of some results, we assume that there is a kind of system or driver dependence in low resolutions of the Counter Strike: Source in Chateau level.