Which have better Performance under Source Engine? ATI or nVidia?

lifanus

lifanus

Gawd
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I'm a big fan of a lot of source engine powered games, and I'm wondering if anyone have any experience with ATI or nVidia's card's performance under source engeine? assume they are in the same league.

I have a HD4870 and I'm wondering if I'd get better performance with a GTX260 in source powered games?

An article with comparesion framerate would be most helpful

thanks guys.
 
Dosen't really mater since any game with the source engine run smooth with either so far.
 
Youre not going to notice any difference going from 4870 to GTX260...
infact I don't see how a 4870 isn't overkill for Source Engine games.
 
Yeah, even my 9800GTX is overkill for Source games. You can always go crazy with the higher AA modes if the game supports it.
 
my 8800gts 320mb runs L4D in 1920x1080 4xAA max settings and well above 60fps.. i dont see how you could even think about needing more than a 4870 for source games.
 
if im not mistaken in source games, the main thing you need is processor clock speed since source does not take advantage of dual and quads well so mostly single threaded in the source engine.
 
Source is more CPU dependent that most other engines, a high clocked dual core will be faster than a moderately clocked quad with the same GPU.
 
In the beginning - a year and a half before Half-Life 2 was even released, Valve and ATI were bedtime butt buddies and made it known that HL2 and the Source engine were designed to work best with ATI's hardware. In fact for several months between November 2003 and mid-2004 the Radeon 9800XT was shipped with a Half-Life 2 scratch-off coupon that entitled the buyer to not only Half-Life 2 (upon release) but the Valve back catalogue (Half-Life, HL: Blue Shift, HL: Opposing Forces, Counter-Strike, etc). Imagine our dismay when those of us who bought shiny new 9800XTs and 9800XTX cards in December 2003 had to wait another YEAR for Half-Life 2 to be released. :p

These days you can still find an ATI logo here and there in Valve's Source powered games but largely they seem to be teaming up with nVidia more often. For instance there is a special demo of 'Portal' for nVidia card owners only, there have been some HL2 pack-ins with Nvidia cards in the past, etc.

As for what the Source engine runs best on? Well largely it doesn't make much of a difference. You have to remember that the Source engine is over FOUR YEARS OLD now. That means it will run perfectly fine on hardware that is merely mediocre by today's standards. Of course it depends on how new the game is and how much the engine has been modified... Left 4 Dead might give all those 'mediocre' systems a run for their money since the Source engine was updated somewhat especially for the game. :)
 
I have to say Source loves ATi hardware, and with ATi I don't see that annoying fog bug.
 
Source used to be ATi's bread and butter, especially when ATi was basically the largest backer of HL2 and Steam when it was first released. Valve has somewhat changed its design about the time Episode 1 came out making it optimized for both Nvidia and ATi hardware after Valve realized that steam stats put Nvidia in heavy favor in ownership. Granted, any high end card will run the source engine above 60fps if there is a decent CPU behind it.

It takes a lot to get a frame drop in L4D on my machine even running max everything with AA/AF and triple buffered V.Sync.
 
that the first with native multicore support no? i know you can force it in others but at the price of constant crashing. hopefully they make multithread backwards compatible from left4dead on back to half life and the such would be cool... but source has much more not multi threaded then it does have multi.

(not sure if i worded what i said wrong or not, but i was trying to say in short that L4D is the exception when i think of when people say source games i think of all of L4D's predecessors. Nice find that its multithreaded though since i played it with vsync on and notice no frame dips with everything turned up i thought that was cool.)
 
Source favored ATI at the time of the 9700/9800 vs Geforce 5x Series, because the shaders on the Geforce 5x Series were never that strong. At the time, ATI cards had much stronger pixel shaders, so the game, of course, ran faster on ATI hardware.

By the time the Nvidia Geforce 6800 and ATI Radeon x850 cards came out, it was largely a moot point. Nvidia had corrected their pixel shader performance, and ATI continued with what they were doing. For a long, long time, I played DoD:Source on a Geforce 6800GT @ 1280x1024 with 4x FSAA and 8x AF, and it ran very smooth. The only times it didn't was when my Athlon64 3200+ couldn't keep up, but c`est la vie.

Nowadays, any $100 video card is going to churn through Source engine games like it's me and a Chipotle burrito. Uh huh.
 
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