Source: CSBANANA
Related: Driver Heaven

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

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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.

View the entire post on the Driver Heaven website.