Refine search for Graphics

  7 comments      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

What can we say about Counter-Strike: Source that hasn't been said before? It is simply the benchmark for team-based online shooters and, four years after its release, it's still one of the most popular game in its genre. In complete contrast to Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it focuses on small environments and incredibly intensive small-scale battles with one-shot kills the order of the day. If you want to test all elements of your first person shooter skills in one go, this is the game to do it.

We test using the 32-bit version of the game using a custom timedemo taken during a game against bots on the cs_militia map. This has a large amount of foliage, so transparency antialiasing has a significant impact on image quality and performance, and is generally one of the most graphically intensive maps available. We find a framerate of at least 60fps is required for serious gaming as this game relies massively on quick, accurate reactions that simply can't be compromised by dropped frames.

All in-game settings are set to their maximum and we test with 0xAA 0xAF, 2xAA 4xAF, and 4xAA 8xAA. Transparency anti-aliasing is also manually turned on through the driver, though this is obviously only enabled when normal AA is being used in-game.

Although ATI's HD 3870 X2 makes a good go of keeping up with GTX280, when it comes to the crunch it simply can't match nVidia's latest. Once again, GTX280 reigns supreme.

Add your comment