Source Engine: Counterstrike Beta Hits The Street

Final Words

ATI is the performance leader when we're talking about Source Engine performance at the high end. Unfortunately, we didn't have an X800 XT to compare with our 6800 Ultra, nor did we have our 6800 nonultra that we predict would have fallen between the 9800 XT and X800 Pro (closer to the latter) in our tests. Apparently, some of our graphics cards decided to go on vacation this week to visit a penguin. When it comes to upper midrange, NVIDIA's 6800 GT seems to have a leg up on the X800 Pro in most tests (though this may have changed if we could have gotten our Pro to run 20x15). This is just further proof that (so far) the GT offers some of the best value in NVIDIA's lineup.

Overall, the framerates we saw in these tests were higher than we expected. Doom III will bring just about anything to its knees at the highest settings, and 2048x1536 wasn't even an option on the list. We still expect to see very high framerates when gameplay elements (more CPU usage) are introduced into the mix. This follows the traditional view (that id Software broke from with Doom III) that higher resolutions and higher framerates are always the better option. Certainly, these aspects have their place, but id has proven they aren't the be all end all of graphics engine design. This fundamental difference in viewpoint helps explain our initial impressions of each game. Source can look incredibly crisp running at a steady framerate at 20x15, and Doom III can look incredibly frightening at 10x7 with its intense shadows, atmosphere and lighting effects, and well executed low contrast edges between overlapping objects.

We will absolutely still have to wait for Halflife 2 before we can make any further judgment calls about relative goodness of the engine. Obviously the outcome of our tests revealed that even when source is pushing its hardest against a graphics cards, modern hardware doesn't have any major trouble rendering scenes.

From our brief look at CPU scaling, we can see that none of our tests were really CPU bound. This helps us know we were pushing our graphics hardware as hard as possible. We can also expect Valve to use as much of the CPU headroom they can for other things in the actual game. This is why we haven't taken as in depth a look at CPU scaling yet.

We hope our coverage of Valve's latest beta release has been informative, and if there is anything further anyone would like to explore, please feel free to drop us a comment and let us know.