X-bit labs - Print version

We still are waiting for the Half-Life 2 to arrive, but Valve Software holds the wraps on any release details of the game that was supposed to be launched on September 30, 2003. Specially for fans of the world’s most-popular online title, Valve launches the totally redone Counter Strike flavour, the Counter Strike: Source, with new engine, effects and level of realizm, but unfailing immersive gameplay during continuous counter-terrorist raids. But what hardware will you need for the siege?

Introduction

Those, who have been waiting for years impatiently for the Half-Life 2 to arrive should probably wait some more time till Valve Software releases its most-anticipated title ever, but this week Valve makes available its long-awaited Counter Strike: Source game to the masses after months of beta-testing. The game is here and we are here to evaluate its performance on different graphics cards that do or will render the CS picture on your displays.

The basic opinion about the game could be formed in mid-August, 2004, when the beta version of the remade Counter Strike hit the web. The game did not revolutionize much from the original version: it has the same objectives and the same means of their achievement. The most-significant changes are, of course, new graphics, physics and audio engines. Other Counter Strike-specific parts remained unchanged.

ESRB, Terrorist Training and Counter Strike

It is not a secret that we live in the world of iniquity; some blame television, the Internet, computer games and cinematography for massive outbreak of violence during the recent years, some say that various types of media just reflect the real world, which is times more dreadful than any computer game or movie.

In order to protect youth from sexual or violent content nearly all games, movies and other content types are shipped with a special ratings that reflect possible audiences for the content. Currently the original Counter Strike is rated as – “M” – Mature by Entertainment Software Rating Board, ESRB. Titles rated Mature have content that “may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain mature sexual themes, more intense violence and/or strong language,” according to ESRB.

In order to pass the ESRB tests and not to be banned by certain stores, like it happened to the Manhunt game, game developers have to restrict realism of their titles and cut-down all potentially questionable content. As a result, loads of games lack involvement of extreme and/or realistic blood, gore, weapons, and depictions of human injury and death. No games after Soldiers of Fortune offered extreme violence with excessive realism. Today’s Counter Strike: Source can boast with the fact that shooting in the face causes marks of blood on that face and… no death. Since the game positions itself as a kind of realistic one, this part worth a regret, as realism definitely suffered from this decision of the game makers and we would suggest that the game would had different settings of realism/violence, as additional realism clearly gives you more portions of adrenaline.

Another thing that Counter Strike game developers had to keep in mind was a possibility to train potential terrorists, hostage keepers and attackers using a realistic game. Probably this can be the only excuse for not including any modern types of terrorists attacks, like plane or train hijacking, massive amount of hostages taking and so on. Even Soldiers of Fortune and Unreal Tournament games presented kinds of train assaults and battles on the streets flooded with civilians, but the new Counter Strike: Source does not have any answers to these pretty valuable types of gameplay.

So, What’s New?

After reading our thoughts along with opinions of others on the Counter Strike: Source game, one could probably ask the main question: what is exactly better on the new game compared to the old one? Well, here are a few answers…

To put it straight, the Counter Strike: Source is an ideal game for those who love original Counter Strike. But if you are looking for a Half-Life 2-like game and have not played the original title, you will hardly find the CS: Source really interesting.

It would not be absolutely correct to extrapolate the peculiarities of the Counter Strike: Source to the forthcoming Half-Life 2, as the first person shooter games typically have more eye candy compared to online titles. Furthermore, framerate requirements of single-person shooters are not that high and developers can add more interesting features to pleasure those who have been waiting for the “game of all games”.

Testbeds and Methods

We will talk more about the Source engine, its conceptions and details, when the Half-Life 2 is released, but now let us try to figure out what graphics card you will need for the Counter Strike: Source. For our benchmarking we used two computers: with AGP 8x interface and with PCI Express x16 interface for graphics cards configured as follows:

We did not disable any texture filtration optimization from NVIDIA’s or ATI’s drivers. Please keep in mind that these drivers are on the beta stage of testing by appropriate developers. We would like to point out that we do not typically test the hardware using beta or alpha drivers. However, NVIDIA’s official drivers at press time were dated July, 2004, while ATI has just corrected a memory management bug in the new 8-07 drivers. So, we had to stick to beta drivers that were obtainable from official web-sites of NVIDIA and ATI.

Image Quality

We took a number of screenshots on top-of-the-range boards from ATI and NVIDIA to find out whether image quality on the RADEON X800 and GeForce 6800 is similar.

ATI RADEON X800 XT and NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra image quality comparison
ATI RADEON X800 XT	NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra

Our brief investigation revealed that there are no difference in image quality on different DirectX 9.0 graphics cards.

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.

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.

Chateau Level, Eye Candy Mode

With anisotropic filtering and full-scene antialiasing enabled the situation when NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800-series lead over competing RADEON X800-series is repeating, however, once the resolution is bumped up, ATI’s X800 XT parts manage to stay a bit ahead of NVIDIA’s top-of-the-range offering.

With FSAA 4x and anisotropic filtering 16 activated not a lot of graphics cards are able to provide 50fps or 60fps. In the light of this it definitely worth to pay attention to the pretty extreme performance levels of NVIDIA’s mainstream GeForce 6600 GT product.

Havana Level, Pure Mode

Our Havana demo represents a hostage taker trying to defend the room with hostages from the counter-terrorist assault. He fires into the glass, executes hostages and gets destroyed by special forces. The demo represents a typical process of the game, hardly requires any huge computing power from the graphics card, but clearly demands a faster central processing unit as killed hostages call for physics engine (well, primarily skinning engine, as this is the demo first of all) that relies on central processing unit.

With the demo being dependant on the CPU, we’ve got nearly equal results on all graphics cards starting from the RADEON 9800 PRO. As for entry-level graphics cards, they are not that good as in the case of the previous demo and such offerings as the RADEON X300 SE definitely do not play the game really fast.

Havana Level, Eye Candy Mode

Surprisingly, CPU dependence remained with the eye-candy mode: the top boards all scored similar results, while some pretty weak offerings remained below 20fps.

Italy Level, Pure Mode

We recorded a yet another “synthetic” demo that does not involve any opponents. We ran across an Italian village, executed hostages and shoot all around the level.

This particular demo is pretty interesting because it puts load on CPU, as we explode the hostages, then it puts pressure on pixel shaders when we activate night vision, then it requires the VPU to rapidly and efficiently remove hidden surfaces, as the streets of the village locate loads of small houses that cause massive overdraw effect.

Due to efficient architecture and hidden surface removal (HSR) engine, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800-series outperforms ATI’s RADEON X800-family by a substantial margin here, on the “Italy” level. Graphics cards based on the RADEON 9800 XT and the GeForce 6600 GT score good framerate, while weaker selection hardly surpasses 40fps.

Italy Level, Eye Candy Mode

Eye candy mode does not bring a huge performance drop to the top boards of today – the GeForce 6800 and the RADEON X800. Therefore, NVIDIA’s GeForce 6-series continue to be ahead of ATI’s fourth generation RADEON products.

Office Level, Pure Mode

Office level is a yet another “hostage drama” in the game, but at this time terrorists do not execute hostages, but shatter the whole office and shoot a counter-terrorist.

The demo represents an actual gaming process that puts nearly equal load on TMUs and pixel shader units, but since the physics engine works hard when we shoot-down the equipment, the results seem to be central processor-dependant.

As said above, dependence on the CPU is clear and the results of the $400 - $500 graphics cards are all about 70fps. More affordable products deliver 50fps – 55fps, whereas graphics cards with slow memory and graphics processor with only 4 rendering pipelines hardly achieve even 30 fps.

Office Level, Eye Candy Mode

Even with full-scene antialiasing and anisotropic filtering activated performance dependence on the CPU remains, which results in negligible performance drop on the expensive boards. Among high-end graphics cards only the GeForce 6800, the GeForce 6600 GT as well as the RADEON 9800 XT can achieve 50 fps in 1600x1200. Lower-end offerings can hardly keep-up with faster brethren with eye candy enabled.

Piranesi Level, Pure Mode

Piranesi level involves a castle build in the 18^th century by Giovanni Piranesi. The demo represents an attack of special forces on terrorists demanding to plant a bomb in the stronghold. The soldier kills two gunmen inside the building.

The level is built in a way that puts more pressure on texturing units rather than on pixel or vertex shaders and this our demo is not that CPU dependent as the Havana demo. Fortunately, almost all graphics cards from our test can run this demo with sufficient speed in variety of resolutions.

If you take a look at the results in 1024x768 resolution, you will surely notice that the results seem to be affected by the power of the CPU, though, NVIIDA’s chips seem to be ahead of ATI’s chips, probably because of somewhat better drivers.

As the resolution grows, we see that NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 Ultra/GT as well as the GeForce 6600 GT offerings remain their leadership over ATI’s RADEON X800- and 9800- product lineups. The explanation for such behavior is not clear, but we suspect that this might be ATI’s drivers that are on the beta stage of testing by the company.

Piranesi Level, Eye Candy Mode

All high-end graphics cards score around 100 fps in 1024x768 and 1280x1024 resolutions, however, only the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition manages to hit 95.5fps in 1600x1200 with eye candy activated.

Graphics cards like the GeForce 6600 GT and RADEON 9800 XT deliver fine framerate even in 1280x1024 resolution, which is one of the most used today.

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.