Counter-Strike: Source

Counter-Strike: Source runs on the same engine as Half-Life2, so you can’t expect any surprises from this test. Still, there are fewer complex special effects here than in Half-Life 2, for example, you don’t often see water. Chateau is one of the levels where there’s some water, though.

The GeForce 6800 Ultra is ahead of the RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition in low resolutions, but the gap dwindles almost to zero in 1280x1024, and ATI’s card wins 1600x1200. The difference between them never goes beyond 10 percent, so we can call it a draw.

The advantage of the GeForce FX 5950 Ultra over the GeForce 6600 GT AGP is easy to explain: the GeForce FX family cards default to use the DirectX 8.1 path in this game, as they also do in Half-Life 2. A number of special effects are missing in this mode to alleviate the load on these cards which are not actually very good at executing pixel shaders.

ATI’s devices again show their best qualities with enabled FSAA and anisotropic filtering. They are a cut above the competitors in high resolutions.