Driverheaven Source Benchmark

***Veridian3*** · Aug 19, 2004, 06:57 AM

At the weekend we published our preview of Counter-Strike: Source, the latest game to be released by Valve. Counter-Strike: Source runs on the excellent Source engine which also powers Half-Life 2. We noted in our preview that even at high settings the engine ran well and performance was excellent however as with other new engines there is always a lot of questions around what card is faster. Luckily Valve have provided a tool in the latest build of CSS which answers that very question and we at Driverheaven have been lucky enough to have access to it.

So today we will be running ATI and Nvidia's high end cards through some Source benchmarks and reporting to you which card you'll want to invest in if your looking for the best performance from the Source engine.

Test Setup:

Connect 3D ATI Radeon X800 XTPE 256mb
Reference Nvidia Geforce 6800Ultra 256mb

Athlon64 FX-53
1gb Corsair PC3200LL
MSI K8T neo2- FIR
80gb Samsung 7200rpm 8mb Cache SATA Drive

Windows XP SP2
DX 9.0c
Nvidia Forceware 61.77
Catalyst 4.8 WHQL

Each test was run 3 times and the middle result shown in the graphs, Nvidia optimisations were on for the testing.

1280x960 0aa 0af

1280x960 4aa 8af

1600x1200 0aa 0af

1600x1200 4aa 8af

Well, i think its safe to say the results speak for themselves. There really is no competition at the moment if your looking for the fastest card to play Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source on. The ATI Radeon X800 XT PE outperforms the Geforce 6800 Ultra in every test we ran, regardless of the settings used for example at the setting of 1600x1200 4x Anti Aliasing/ 8xAniostropic Filtering (the lowest setting that most enthusiast users would expect to use) the Radeon outperforms the Geforce by 30%.

Out of intrest we also ran the game at the maximum AA/AF settings available to us, this means 6xAA-16xAF on the Radeon and 8xSAA-16xAF on the Geforce.

1280x960 Maxed

1600x1200 maxed

Again, at these enhanced settings the difference is huge. At maximum detail, the Radeon X800XTPE just streaks away from the Geforce 6800 Ultra and ends up 65% faster. Its also worth noting that the X800XTPE is showing completely playable framerates at the maximum possible quality where as the 6800 Ultra is only achieving playable framerates at much lower quality.

Conclusion:
Shocked is one word that comes to mind looking at these results. Where Nvidia has beaten ATI by a reasonable margin in Doom3 the results completely reverse and then some on the Source engine, a 30% performance difference ( 74fps to 52fps ) is, to be honest, a massive dissapointment if your a Geforce 6800 Ultra user. We had fully expected to have a very close contest when running the benchmarks however that has not proven to be the case, hopefully Nvidia have a new driver in the works that will bump up performance enough to make things competitive.

Edit: Graphs got a bit mixed up in the transfer...results were always correct and now the graphs are in the right place

Judas · Aug 19, 2004, 07:08 AM

whoa?

Counterfe1t · Aug 19, 2004, 07:13 AM

interesting i expected nvidia to have a performance drop when compared to radeon but i did not expect a drop of 65% i anticipated a drop of around 10-15%

~~HawK~~ · Aug 19, 2004, 07:17 AM

Oh dear... Doom and no 1/2Life for NV ??

technonerd · Aug 19, 2004, 07:19 AM

Hehe, I was playing CS:source and everybody said that 6800 will be way faster than X800. oooh they're up for surprise . That was very impressive, glad that I brought x800.

BTW Source was awesome.

***Veridian3*** · Aug 19, 2004, 07:21 AM

Some screens at each cards max playable settings

Radeon 1600x1200 6aa 16af

Geforce 1600x1200 4aa 8af

orrm · Aug 19, 2004, 07:23 AM

considering the fact the Counter Strike is the most playable multiplayer game on the planet... i'd say way to go ATi lol....

im planning on buying the X800XTPE anyway. Im a ATi fan since 9700 revolution... so these are good news...

~~HawK~~ · Aug 19, 2004, 07:27 AM

Call me an ATI boy if you want but the in first picture somehow it looks like the Ati one has more dept.. while the GF pic looks flatter

was sure I saw 4 pic's ??

Counterfe1t · Aug 19, 2004, 07:29 AM

I will tell you one thing that mostly everyone can agree on source is as much addicting as when the original CS was released. i cant remember the last time i went 4 hours straight until today.

Ev!L-aLphA · Aug 19, 2004, 07:36 AM

sweet =) to bad i cant see any of the darn hud or text or any thing with my new x800xt

sPaNk · Aug 19, 2004, 07:40 AM

Beautiful!!

sPaNk

Dom · Aug 19, 2004, 08:21 AM

Cool!

Resistor · Aug 19, 2004, 09:35 AM

This is just unbelievable... Nvidia losing by that much...
Looks like 9800pro will be pretty on par with Nvidia then??

Erroneus · Aug 19, 2004, 09:49 AM

Breathtaking :O

Hardly suprising the scores

Doom3 = nvidia game and HL2 = Ati game

And thanks for this, hl2 looks much more cooler then doom3

germanjulian · Aug 19, 2004, 09:53 AM

lol look at that expensive PC with all that ueber hardware and that ueber nvidia card...
now look at my system and what I got:

1024x768 resolution: All settings at high and WATER REFLECTION = ALL not just characters but also the world:

2AA and 8 AF = 40FPS
2AA and 4AF = 42Fps
2AA and no AF = 45Fps
0AA and no AF = 76Fps
0AA and 8AF = 65Fps.

Veridian3 did you also enable to reflect all objects in the settings? (I am sure you did).

look everybody my medium PC is nearly as fast as that nvidia ueber PC. rofl (me happy)
me also happy nvidiots are unhappy now...

Aug 19, 2004, 06:57 AM	#1
*Veridian3* Administrator Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Cloaked Posts: 3,441 Rep Power: 89	Driverheaven Source Benchmark At the weekend we published our preview of Counter-Strike: Source, the latest game to be released by Valve. Counter-Strike: Source runs on the excellent Source engine which also powers Half-Life 2. We noted in our preview that even at high settings the engine ran well and performance was excellent however as with other new engines there is always a lot of questions around what card is faster. Luckily Valve have provided a tool in the latest build of CSS which answers that very question and we at Driverheaven have been lucky enough to have access to it. So today we will be running ATI and Nvidia's high end cards through some Source benchmarks and reporting to you which card you'll want to invest in if your looking for the best performance from the Source engine. Test Setup: Connect 3D ATI Radeon X800 XTPE 256mb Reference Nvidia Geforce 6800Ultra 256mb Athlon64 FX-53 1gb Corsair PC3200LL MSI K8T neo2- FIR 80gb Samsung 7200rpm 8mb Cache SATA Drive Windows XP SP2 DX 9.0c Nvidia Forceware 61.77 Catalyst 4.8 WHQL Each test was run 3 times and the middle result shown in the graphs, Nvidia optimisations were on for the testing. 1280x960 0aa 0af 1280x960 4aa 8af 1600x1200 0aa 0af 1600x1200 4aa 8af Well, i think its safe to say the results speak for themselves. There really is no competition at the moment if your looking for the fastest card to play Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source on. The ATI Radeon X800 XT PE outperforms the Geforce 6800 Ultra in every test we ran, regardless of the settings used for example at the setting of 1600x1200 4x Anti Aliasing/ 8xAniostropic Filtering (the lowest setting that most enthusiast users would expect to use) the Radeon outperforms the Geforce by 30%. Out of intrest we also ran the game at the maximum AA/AF settings available to us, this means 6xAA-16xAF on the Radeon and 8xSAA-16xAF on the Geforce. 1280x960 Maxed 1600x1200 maxed Again, at these enhanced settings the difference is huge. At maximum detail, the Radeon X800XTPE just streaks away from the Geforce 6800 Ultra and ends up 65% faster. Its also worth noting that the X800XTPE is showing completely playable framerates at the maximum possible quality where as the 6800 Ultra is only achieving playable framerates at much lower quality. Conclusion: Shocked is one word that comes to mind looking at these results. Where Nvidia has beaten ATI by a reasonable margin in Doom3 the results completely reverse and then some on the Source engine, a 30% performance difference ( 74fps to 52fps ) is, to be honest, a massive dissapointment if your a Geforce 6800 Ultra user. We had fully expected to have a very close contest when running the benchmarks however that has not proven to be the case, hopefully Nvidia have a new driver in the works that will bump up performance enough to make things competitive. Edit: Graphs got a bit mixed up in the transfer...results were always correct and now the graphs are in the right place

Aug 19, 2004, 07:13 AM	#3
Counterfe1t DriverHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Texas Posts: 440 Rep Power: 0	interesting i expected nvidia to have a performance drop when compared to radeon but i did not expect a drop of 65% i anticipated a drop of around 10-15% __________________

Aug 19, 2004, 07:23 AM	#7
orrm DriverHeaven Junior Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Posts: 21 Rep Power: 0	considering the fact the Counter Strike is the most playable multiplayer game on the planet... i'd say way to go ATi lol.... im planning on buying the X800XTPE anyway. Im a ATi fan since 9700 revolution... so these are good news... __________________ Cheers, orrm.

Aug 19, 2004, 07:27 AM	#8
~~HawK~~ Banned Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 2,092 Rep Power: 0	Call me an ATI boy if you want but the in first picture somehow it looks like the Ati one has more dept.. while the GF pic looks flatter was sure I saw 4 pic's ?? Last edited by HawK; Aug 19, 2004 at 07:33 AM. Reason: Magic pure magic.. where are the pics gone ?

Aug 19, 2004, 07:29 AM	#9
Counterfe1t DriverHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Aug 2004 Location: Texas Posts: 440 Rep Power: 0	I will tell you one thing that mostly everyone can agree on source is as much addicting as when the original CS was released. i cant remember the last time i went 4 hours straight until today. __________________

Aug 19, 2004, 07:17 AM	#4
~~HawK~~ Banned Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 2,092 Rep Power: 0	Oh dear... Doom and no 1/2Life for NV ??

Aug 19, 2004, 07:19 AM	#5
technonerd DriverHeaven Senior Member Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Calgary, Alberta, Canada Posts: 594 Rep Power: 0	Hehe, I was playing CS:source and everybody said that 6800 will be way faster than X800. oooh they're up for surprise . That was very impressive, glad that I brought x800. BTW Source was awesome.

Aug 19, 2004, 07:21 AM	#6
*Veridian3* Administrator Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Cloaked Posts: 3,441 Rep Power: 89	Some screens at each cards max playable settings Radeon 1600x1200 6aa 16af Geforce 1600x1200 4aa 8af

Aug 19, 2004, 07:36 AM	#10
Ev!L-aLphA \| n f e c t e D Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: California Posts: 4,110 Rep Power: 50	sweet =) to bad i cant see any of the darn hud or text or any thing with my new x800xt __________________ R.I.P 8/8/04 4/21/08

Aug 19, 2004, 07:40 AM	#11
sPaNk DriverHeaven Junior Member Join Date: May 2003 Location: Winnipeg, Canada Posts: 71 Rep Power: 0	Beautiful!! sPaNk

Aug 19, 2004, 08:21 AM	#12
Dom DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Jun 2002 Posts: 12,940 Rep Power: 0	Cool!

Aug 19, 2004, 09:35 AM	#13
Resistor Get it Going.. Join Date: May 2004 Location: Brisbane ..Oz Posts: 698 Rep Power: 0	This is just unbelievable... Nvidia losing by that much... Looks like 9800pro will be pretty on par with Nvidia then??

Aug 19, 2004, 09:49 AM	#14
Erroneus Get of my lawn! Join Date: Aug 2002 Location: Denmark Posts: 13,073 Rep Power: 88	Breathtaking :O Hardly suprising the scores Doom3 = nvidia game and HL2 = Ati game And thanks for this, hl2 looks much more cooler then doom3 __________________

Aug 19, 2004, 09:53 AM	#15
germanjulian Back in London Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: London Posts: 1,795 Rep Power: 0	lol look at that expensive PC with all that ueber hardware and that ueber nvidia card... now look at my system and what I got: 1024x768 resolution: All settings at high and WATER REFLECTION = ALL not just characters but also the world: 2AA and 8 AF = 40FPS 2AA and 4AF = 42Fps 2AA and no AF = 45Fps 0AA and no AF = 76Fps 0AA and 8AF = 65Fps. Veridian3 did you also enable to reflect all objects in the settings? (I am sure you did). look everybody my medium PC is nearly as fast as that nvidia ueber PC. rofl (me happy) me also happy nvidiots are unhappy now... __________________ /\|\ Asus P5W DH Deluxe, Intel C2D E6600, 2GB Corsair XMS2-6400C4 DDR2, E-VGA GeForce 7800 GT, Creative X-Fi Extreme Music, 500GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA, Lian Li PC-V1100 Aluminum Case Black, etc. http://germanjulian.com /\|\