Counter-Strike: Source Benchmarked

Introduction:

Just about 15 months ago, the world finally found out what Valve Software had been working on since the release of Half-Life on the PC in 1998. At E3 2003 Valve announced Half-Life 2, a brand new first person shooter featuring amazing graphics, unique game play and a brand new physics engine that Valve said would revolutionize PC gaming. At this year’s E3, Valve showed off the multiplayer portion of Half Life 2, better known as Counter-Strike: Source.

Counter-Strike: Source is essentially the Counter-Strike you know and love ported over to Valve’s Source Engine, the engine that Half-Life 2 was built on, as well as the engine that will be used in many games that will be released in the coming months, including Vampire – The Masquerade.

As many of you know, Half Life 2 and Counter-Strike: Source are basically done. The game is going to go gold any day now and should be in store shelves some time in September. With that said, we got our hands on the latest build of Counter-Strike: Source and are bringing you the world’s first, "unofficial" Source Engine benchmarks, using Counter-Strike Source.

We say "unofficial" because Valve is currently working on an official benchmark tool that will be out in the coming weeks to help benchmark using the Source Engine, but we couldn’t wait so we decided to benchmark Counter-Strike: Source ourselves. In this, Part One of a three part series examining performance in the Source Engine, I will be testing out NVIDIA and ATI’s latest flagship graphic cards, the NV40 based GeForce 6800 Ultra, 6800GT, 6800 Standard, and the R420 based Radeon X800 XT Platinum Edition and Radeon X800 Pro.