Counter Strike: Source

(Frames Per Second - Higher Is Better)

Radeon X800 XT PE

Radeon X800 Pro

GeForce 6800 Ultra

GeForce 6800 GT

GeForce 6800

800x600, Stress Test

113

111

117

116

116

800x600, GameSpot Dust01

41.3

41.5

43.6

43.3

44.2

1024x768, Stress Test

112

108

118

116

106

1024x768, GameSpot Dust01

41

41

43.5

43.3

43

1600x1200, Stress Test

94

74

89

79

58

1600x1200, GameSpot Dust01

41

40.6

43.5

43.4

42

1600x1200, 4xAA/8xAF, Stress Test

68

52

58

51

25

1600x1200, 4xAA/8xAF, GameSpot Dust01

40.5

40

43.5

42.7

28

We see the Radeon X800 Pro and X800 XT PE finally take the lead over their GeForce 6800 GT and Ultra counterparts at our most challenging Stress Test setting, but the bottleneck never shifts over from the CPU to the video card in our in-game timedemo tests, even at 1600x1200 with 4x antialiasing and 8x anisotropic filtering enabled.

If you're paranoid about staying competitive with other Counter-Strike: Source players, there's a good chance the card you have right now will be sufficient. The Radeon 9800 Pro and 9600 XT performed very well in our CPU-limited Dust benchmark, and the even older GeForce4 MX440 and Ti4600 cards also put up decent numbers by falling back to a previous DirectX version. If image quality is a concern, then you'll likely need to upgrade to a DX9-capable card to gain access to the higher-quality effects, but note that GeForce FX-series cards currently use the DX8 path for Counter-Strike: Source.

From a pure benchmarking standpoint, the Radeon X800 series did pull away from the GeForce 6800 series as we increased resolution and filtering settings in the Video Stress Test, but both graphics card families offered similar performance levels in our in-game Dust testing. Valve did such a great job at making Counter-Strike: Source accessible to all video cards that the only way to open up a timedemo performance gap between the latest ATI and Nvidia cards would be to increase resolution and filtering settings up to unrealistic levels.