Today VR-Zone Hardware brings you the world's first Counter-Strike: Source benchmarks. In part one of our three part article on Counter-Strike: Source, we take a look at how ATI and NVIDIA's latest high end GPU's perform in real world Counter-Strike: Source gameplay.

Kristen Perry, one of Valve's extremely talented artists, has kindly granted HL2mods UK permission to showcase some of her Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 artwork, which most people will not have seen before at this resolution. They're certainly worth a look for anyone interested in the illustrative side of these games.

Bob Mandel over Avault gave the Highest Rating "SEAL OF EXCELLENCE" to Doom 3. This review characterizes as unfair some negative critics about the game's gameplay and gives right to all gameplay design decisions made.

"Without being revolutionary (except technologically), this offering provides a fresh and overwhelming experience that makes me forget about everything else. I like virtually every design decision id made, and count this as my favorite PC first-person shooter and one of my top computer titles of all time in any genre. If you love monsters, machines and mayhem, as I do, this is your game."

On the eve of the open phase for Counter-Strike Source BETA, Game2XS have 4 new movies showing off Valve?s awesome new shooter. The movies are quite short but give a good idea of what preloaded players can expect tomorrow. Download them here.

Valve released Counter-Strike:Source Beta pre-load to CS:CZ/HL2 vouchers. tomorrow the beta will be unlocked.

At the Siggraph conference in Los Angeles, Valve's Viktor Antonov participated on a panel entitled, "Next Generation Game Visuals." he discussed world creation, research, architecture, lighting, and concepts for the art direction of Half-Life 2. Viktor showed some of the HL2 demos from this year's E3, and a Powerpoint presentation featuring references used in the creation of HL2 along with the end result screenshots from the game.

Update: PlanetHalf-Life have also thrown up their chat with Valve software:

Q: When will the Benchmark tool be released, or is it still planned?

File Rush has a mirror for the Half Life 2 E3 2004 Trailer in a ultra Hi-res Bink format.

A playable demo of Street Legal Racing: Redline is now available, offering the opportunity to try out this urban racing simulation sequel by Invictus and Activision Value. This trial version allows you to play for up to a generous 60 minutes, but also includes all content of the full game that you can activate after purchasing a license key online.

3D Gamers reports Electronic Arts has issued an updated mod development kit for Battlefield Vietnam, upgrading this toolkit for Digital Illusions' 3D multiplayer action game to version 2.5. This release adds enhancements and fixes to the vehicle editor, .SM file imports and exports, the menu editor, and more.

FarCryHQ is hosting a co-op mod for Far Cry allowing to play all single-player missions with up to 3 players.

FarCryHQ - Gamer's Hell

An update to the Counter-Strike: Source beta has been released to cyber cafés that subscribe to the Valve Cyber Café Program. Steam will update itself automatically when restarted, and servers also need to be restarted.

It comes out that there's a huge bug in the french (and possibly others) traslated version of doom3. In certain circumstances the game would revert back to english with no way for the end user to go back to the local language without tweaking the config files. A post about the topic is at Doom3 Center

3D Gamers reports that EgoSoft has issued a tiny patch for X² - The Threat, tweaking the Artificial Life Engine in their space combat exploration game. This fix requires version 1.4 of the retail game, and word is: "Some unwanted behaviour for captured ships has been corrected. This is a recommended download for all players."

PC-IGN have thrown up their first-person shooters Roundup with the most promising shooters from now until Christmas, in one handy article!

We have some memorable franchises returning to our screens, with Half-Life, Medal of Honor, Tribes, and Ghost Recon present and accounted for. There are also some promising titles we've only been hearing about recently, like Star Wars Battlefront, Painkiller: Battle out of Hell, and Close Combat: First to Fight. Well, folks, all of these and more are about to be unleashed upon us in an avalanche of gaming goodness that will probably have us glued to our mice and keyboards until the snow finally melts away.

GGMania reports were you dissapointed by the lackluster sounds of Doom 3? Do you want your pistol not to sound like a Nerf air gun? Wish the enemies made sounds that could actually scare someone? Long for the far superior sounds by Trent Reznor? Well look no further, for here they are! This mod (8.6MB) changes the sounds for theimp, the pinky, the zombie, the fat zombie, the zombie commando, the hell knight, the pistol, the shotgun, the machine gun, the chaingun, the player, that's it!

Here's the first in-game screenshots of Counter-Strike: Source Beta that were taken on a low end system from Valve's Cyber Café Program.

Just got word that TweakGuides.com have thrown up their Doom 3 Tweak Guide!

The guide contains full descriptions of all the in-game settings, troubleshooting tips, and most importantly a comprehensive list of advanced console and config tweaks, all explained and with recommendations for what to use. So without any further ado, click this link to: Read the Guide

It has come to our attention that it is possible to preload the Counter-Strike: Source early off Steam.

Read More.

Following the release of Doom3 it?s seen many a discussions such as gameplay, graphics, benchmarking and tweaking. In this short interview we talk to id?s John Carmack about various elements of the title that are pertinent to benchmarking, as well as some of the queries that have arisen following some of the choices made within the games shader code.

The promised playable demo for Myst IV Revelation is now available, allowing you to try out the first-person point-n-click adventure sequel being crafted by Ubi Soft Montreal. Word is the demo "puts players in Atrus' room, which contains a number of objects, a trademark Myst puzzle, and an FMV flashback of Atrus' daughter."

3D Gamers - Gamer's Hell