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I recently purchased a radeon 9600 xt 256mb, to upgrade from my old card geforce2 GTS lol, and to my surprise my avg fps in cs source was accually a litte lower,55fps. i have seen threads about this problem but have found no solution to fixing my problem, if anyone could help that would be awsome, thanks.

WHATEVER FPS U WER GETTIN B4 MUST HAVE BEEN PRETTY INSANE FOR A GEFORCE 2 LOL! : )

OUT OF INTEREST WHAT KIND OF DETAIL SETTINGS AND RESOLUTION ARE YOU PLAYING AT? iN LOWER RESOLUTIONS IT COULD BE JUST BECAUSE OF A CPU BOTTLENECK!!! THE SOURCE ENGINE IS LIKE THAT!!!!!!

Going from a GF2 to a 9600, you got a much faster, more powerful videocard.

Unfortunately, you also went from a DirectX 7.0 to a DirectX 9.0 videocard. DX9.0 has tons more features and whizbangs which can easily consume-up all that added new graphics horsepower.. as well as place substantially more load on the rest of your PC to compensate.

Luckily, Halflife2/CounterStrike:Source allows you to force the DirectX level with the mat_dxlevel command. You can put this in the console as:
mat_dxlevel 70 (for DirectX 7.0 as your GF2 used to supply)
mat_dxlevel 80 (DirectX 8.0)
mat_dxlevel 81 (DirectX 8.1)

Realize the newer, cooler walls and water will go back to looking how they did on the GF2. The extra nice looking surfaces, shaders and the like take a large performance toll, but can be disabled by forcing the older DX level compliance.

Edit- a small visual example using HL2:Source LostCoast:

(click to see the full-size image)
DirectX 7.0 level (Geforce2):



DirectX 9.0 level (9600 series):

whizbangs....oh that was funny