With the actual game close to its release, earlier this week Steam subscribers and ATI Half-Life 2 voucher holders were given the opportunity to play the beta version of Counter-Strike: Source (a re-make of the original using the new HL2 engine) and with it also came a benchmarking utility which let's us have a peek at how current videocards will perform in Valve's awaited sequel.

"The Half-Life 2 stress test is really just a quick timedemo that runs through an E3 demo we saw in 2003. In the demo are many of the Source Engine's special effects, including bump-mapping, sub-divided surfaces and light blooming. I've also received a lot of email regarding NVIDIA's leaked 65.62 Forceware drivers, so I will be including benchmarks with those as well."

VR-Zone is one of the few websites that have posted comparison results, mostly important they test using the Half-Life 2 stress demo and not Counter-Strike's which uses less visual effects and does not give the complete picture on what performance to expect from the actual game. As was to be expected, ATI's X800 cards are on top with all NVIDIA 6800-boards following 10-15% behind in most tests, good news is that there's still time for some more drivers optimization and in general terms, all new-generation cards perform quite good.

That was ran with AMD Athlon 64 3800+, Radeon 9600 XT and better.

I'd like to see results from what is said to be the minimum requirements, 700 MHz CPU and a DX6-capable graphics card. That would show if the engine actually scales like advertized.

Well I ran the stress test (which comes with the Steam Counter-Strike Source beta) and got 52 fps on average. I don't know if it used my settings of 1280x1024 LCD (thats what it says in the game settings, LCD.. strange having a resolution thats apparently specifically for LCD) or whether it uses a default resolution.