I tried testing all of these graphics cards, and spoiler alert, the Geforce 4090 was the fastest.
There’s no point in me stringing you on for another 10 minutes if this is all you wanted to
see. But if you haven’t finished your sandwich or whatever it is you kids eat these days,
and want to watch a bit more video, then the rest of this video should have you covered.
I’ll start with these 4 cards, because they’re all $200 graphics cards from different eras in
history. We have the classic Geforce 1060 VS Radeon 480 battle going on back in 2016,
then the painfully cut-down Radeon 5500 XT which nobody liked, and then the even more
cut-down mobile-based 6500 XT chip that nobody liked even more. I spent
£200 on this one! The rest I stole obviously. So this is the sort of tier of graphics card
I would traditionally recommend for a game like Counter-Strike: because it doesn’t break the bank,
yet it delivers hundreds of frames a second. So pay attention to how the 6500 XT compares
against the 5500 XT, because it’s not the generational improvement that you might expect
it to be. Well, actually now you might because all graphics cards are disappointing these days.
But of PARTICULAR interest to me is the Radeon 480 VS the Geforce 1060. Now, the 480 was a bit
slower and required an overclocked refresh in the form of the 580 to truly compete against
the 1060… but what I have here is a custom design 480, with so many fans that it’s longer than even
the Geforce 4090 is -it means I can’t use it in anything but my main PC simply because it
won’t fit!- and it’s up against a 6 GB 1060 that I ripped straight out from my trusty Dell prebuild.
We’ll start by maxing CS:GO out at 1080p, with 8x MSAA. So just know that you can
claw some performance back by turning the anti-aliasing or ambient occlusion down,
and yes, maybe even the anisotropic filtering. But maxed out, the Geforce 1060 destroyed the
Radeon 480. Like, more than I would have expected it to. Perhaps more importantly,
their 1% lows were exactly the same- and better than the newer card’s were… which is embarrassing.
But the 480 just doesn’t ever seem to get as fast. And in Counter Strike 2 it’s an even sadder story,
with the 480 not even managing 144 hz. But none of them are looking too great here. They all
drop to about half the speed in Counter-Strike 2 that they were getting in CS:GO. Though the
minimums haven’t dropped by quite as much. But that’s fine! Because I also tested 720p
lowest settings, which is how people seem to play any way. And here, the results are all over the
shop. Don’t know what these cards are doing if I’m honest. We’re now talking about 800 fps in CS:GO,
dropping to maybe 500ish in CS2. The 6500 XT looks good here! Which might be the first time
anyone’s ever said that about the card. And I hate to shoot it down while it’s doing well,
but the reason the 6500 XT is hated so much is because it’s a very uneven performer,
with lots of exotic limitations. They’ve pretty much got half a graphics card and then have
clocked it super high which has apparently helped it in Counter Strike 2, but if you run into one of
the limitations of this card then your performance will plummet, and using an older system I was
getting about 40 fps on dangerzone maps, and even down some of the sightlines on Ancient,
which has made me lose a bit of trust with the 6500 XT in Counter Strike, but it’s too
early to tell if the same issues persist with these maps in Counter Strike 2, and whether it
happens on PCI-E 3, 4 or both standards. And the 480 claws back some ground VS the 1060. It’s still
slower on average, but now has higher minimums. There’s a reason I’ve fixated on these cards, and
it’s because they’re the oldest generations and slowest tiers that I deem to be still relevant.
IF you have something older or slower than these, and it’s slowing you down, then I’m not going to
take you seriously when you start complaining about it. These cards were cheap when they
came out. And sure, there have been some rough times in the meantime but prices are coming down
again and you can find cards of this calibre for £100-£150. And probably less if you shop around.
I’m saying this because, while I do have some sympathy for people whose PCs worked with CS:GO
when it first came out, but who are now struggling because of all the updates it’s received,
you have to accept that it’s not the same game as it was 10 years ago. It’s time to upgrade.
Which moves me onto the next category: REALLY old cards! One of these is a Radeon 380,
which is very similar to these EVEN OLDER cards. And the other is the Geforce 680, which I swear
died from the moisture levels in my old house, but it has came BACK FROM THE DEAD to battle
against its sworn Radeon rival from the time! Oooh, what an exciting showdown.
And don’t ask me how, but both these cards have 4 GB even though I’m sure they only
had 2 at the time. Yeah it’s weird right. And this was VERY interesting: in CS:GO,
at high settings, both these cards were managing over 144 fps average, maxed out, with 8x MSAA.
These are cards, older than CS:GO itself -sort of- and they’re still pumping out seriously impressive
and smooth-feeling framerates in the game at the end of its lifetime. What a great investment.
But Counter Strike 2 proves punishing, especially on the 380. I took a few minutes to mess with FSR
on the Radeon 380. Because that’s exactly what a feature like FSR is for: it’s here to squeeze
just that little bit more performance out of a card that’s right on the cusp between playable
and unplayable. I didn’t do a proper benchmark or anything but can confirm that FSR sped it up,
more than whatever overhead such a feature comes with, slows it down. So this is great
news for users of older cards. If we drop to low settings,
it changes the situation quite a bit. Now, the 380 pulls well ahead of the 680,
which suffers from terrible 1% lows. Some of these 1% lows are even worse than they were at
high settings! But look at the numbers here: we’re still looking beyond 200 fps average, and 1% lows
of 100. I’m not going to recommend you go out and buy these cards because they’re ancient, but they
can still get hundreds of FPS in Counter Strike. These were unfortunately the oldest cards that
I tested. This wasn’t as low as I wanted to go, though- I really wanted to test 2 GB cards like
the Geforce 760, or Radeon 250 or the ANCIENT Radeon 6870, but they sadly succumbed to the
moisture in my old house. Or maybe from being a makeshift doorstop for a while, who knows.
The year is 2016. Nvidia has launched the GTX 1000 series, and AMD has responded with Polaris.
But it isn’t fast enough: they need a HERO. And that hero was VEGA! Who can forget that bizarre
trailer involving a small boy getting excited about discovering lots of drums. Problem was,
the card launched and it was kind of like the GTX 1000 series but a year later. But the price was
right! Which is something graphics cards DON’T get right these days. So I have a soft spot for Vega,
and it surprises me by being actually rather good in modern games. I forget
to look for it sometimes but look, here it is! Still being fairly decent and all
that. And widely available on Ebay for just over £100. Which puts the value
proposition of the others I’ve tested into question. But be warned: it consumes power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R8F-aN6W4g If you do get this card, maybe don’t get
the default blower version. I love this power meter, showing how much power it’s consuming.
Sadly it’s also representing how much coil whine there is as you can see from THIS.
BUT HOW DOES IT PERFORM IN-GAME. Well… it’s second best to the 4090. Sometimes
getting close to it, like at low settings where it’s more of a CPU bottleneck, while other times,
it slips back to performing more like the $200 cards that I was talking about from earlier,
but on STEROIDS! It might not always be really fast, but its 1% lows were… good.
Maybe it’s the HBM2 memory. Maybe it’s my sloppy testing technique. But Vega shone brightly,
especially in CS:GO, but still had just enough in the tank for what CS2 needs to max it out
at 1080p. When you’re talking about 170 fps average, but still 141 fps 1% lows,
I’d deem Vega a card capable of 144hz, high settings in this game. Provided you’re running
about an empty map. And I suppose this is a good time to reach a conclusion of sorts.
And my conclusion is this: CS2 runs considerably slower than CS:GO does, especially at high
settings. And this will drop 300 fps cards down to 150 fps, straight away. It’s only a problem if
you max out the settings though. Go easy on the anti-aliasing, disable the ambient occlusion and
you’ll claw a lot of performance back. Just see these things as being ‘bonuses’ of the Counter
Strike 2 engine. You don’t HAVE to have them. And who’s playing the game like this any way.
Set the game down to low settings, 720p, and this is how it performs. I can even show the
4090 here and it doesn’t embarrass the rest of them too much. And this is when I have to ask:
do you need more performance than this? Yes, it’s nice to have. But do you need more? In fact,
do you need more than this, or this, or… this? You might want more than this
though. I understand you there. You’ll always want a buffer,
because framerates can drop in games. Action will ramp up, there’s netcode to decode,
characters running about and grenades being thrown overhead, and these are all overheads that…
…can’t be tested for the way I’ve done my benchmarks. I run about an empty map in a
pre-planned route for 60 seconds. The way I do it is CONSISTENT- it’s great for comparing
one graphics card against another. And I’m so familiar with the route, I know if something’s
off with it. But playing online? While it would open the gateway to a thousand new variables,
I understand why you might want me to test like that, because it would be more representative of
real-world performance. It’s just that I didn’t test like that. And couldn’t
But what I have determined is that, simply by playing in an empty map,
there is a substantial framerate drop by moving from CSGO to CS2,
at least when using a processor fast enough to reveal these patterns. Counter Strike 2 isn’t
the Cyberpunk of slowing PCs down. It’s just not as fast as CS:GO was.
And remember: while a faster graphics card will allow for better performance,
a slower CPU will limit how fast it can get. And so at this point, I suggest you choose a
level of performance that you’re happy with, and to find a CPU that will allow you to reach that
level. Because a fast CPU is a lot more affordable than a ‘fast’ graphics card is, these days. Don’t
just go for the fastest of everything. That’s foolish. That’s what I’ve done. Don’t do that,
and you’ll save a lot of money. Yeah I know only 4 GB of VRAM,
they should have been more forward-thinking when they released this £X GPU in X
NOTE TESTING METHODS, 6500 XT PCIE 4, exact model types of each card etc. 8 core /8 thread CPU