No it wouldn't. Try placing 8000 bricks in Blockland, then 8000 cargo containers in Gmod. See the difference in fps.
Thats cos Gmod gives each type of item its own properties like mass, gravity, bouyancy, breakable, sounds, even what kind of shape a bullet hole will make.
If were using bricks it would only need a few properties. Sadly that defeats the point of using Source engine and Source isnt very good at rendering large open maps. It was designed more for close interior maps.
ZING!
But still, interior maps can be a lot of fun.
We would get stuck rendering models using tris unless we rebuilt Source from scratch. We'd also have to modify the engine to support hiding unseen faces on bricks. Kompressor's brick optimization probably wouldn't work with bricks with physics.
If we take the physics out of source, there isn't really any other reason to use it. Its a good engine, and with a purchase of HL2 for $40 you can pretty much start designing games for it, but if you strip the physics out of it, it really doesn't have that much of an advantage over any other engine, other then the fact that its really affordable.
