The Test
These benchmarks are going to test the power of the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ CPU vs. the NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT GPU. The games tested are CoD2, CS 1.6, CS:S, and Q4. All tests, unless specifically stated, use maxiumum in-game texture quality settings with no anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering. All tests are conducted with sound on and with mIRC, Ventrilo, xfire, and Steam running in the background.

Counter-Strike 1.6
Testing Counter-Strike 1.6 is most likely futile, as most of us already know that high FPS has a lot more to do with your CPU than your graphics card. Nevertheless, here's the test:



As it turns out, our assumption is correct. We only tested up to 1280x1024, however, I'd be confident in saying CS 1.6 is CPU limited all the way up to 1600x1200 and beyond. That is simply what happens with an older game, as the ingame graphics fall far behind the capabilities of current video cards.

Counter-Strike: Source
Next on our agenda is CS 1.6's graphical successor, Counter-Strike Source. As a more graphically intensive game, we should probably expect the graphics card to be the limiting factor in this one.



Interestingly, at the common resolutions for gamers, the game is in fact CPU limited, which is quite surprising considering how detailed the game engine is.