Date:
Tuesday , November 25, 2008
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Left 4 Dead Gameplay Performance and IQ

Valve Software's newest game, Left 4 Dead, is a first person zombie shooter with Valve's typical high polish and refinement. But how does it perform? We'll show you, on the latest video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with plenty of image quality screenshots to boot.

Introduction

Released by Valve Software to retail and Steam distribution on November 18, Left 4 Dead is a brand new IP from Valve. Valve, of course, is more commonly known as the creator of the Half-Life saga. Valve Software has an enviable reputation for producing very high-quality and fun games, thanks to their extremely high standards for development, design, and internal iteration testing.

The Game

Left 4 Dead is a First Person Shooter, and tells the story of four survivors of a virulent plague which has turned most of humanity into ferocious zombies, known as "Infected". The story is told as a series of four "Films" (or campaigns), each of which consists of five Acts (or missions). The first four Acts of each Film are essentially the same: the band of four survivors must travel from one safe room to another. The 5th Act in each Film is an explosive finale, with the survivors defending themselves and each other while they wait for what seems like ages for some form of rescue. Players must cut through literally hundreds of infected in each Act. Most of the zombies are essentially mindless drones, knowing only one command: Attack. There are a number of special infected, though, such as the Hunter, which moves very fast but is not difficult to kill; the Witch, which also moves fast, but is more resistant to gunfire; and the Tank, a slow-moving behemoth of a zombie, which is exceptionally strong and durable.

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One of the foremost features of Left 4 Dead is the online co-operative campaign. Players can team up with three of their friends, or even complete strangers, to play through each of the game's four Films. There is also a “versus” mode, adding the ability to play as the infected against survivor adversaries. Left 4 Dead makes extensive use of Steam's achievement system throughout the single-player campaign, and all multi-player modes. Teamwork is a key part of Left 4 Dead's gameplay, and the survivors must protect each other along the way. Players are recognized for protecting each other, healing each other, and for giving each other a hand up when they are knocked down.

Another important feature is the so-called "AI Director." The director modifies the intensity and difficulty of the AI-controlled zombie horde, based on the tactical performance of the band of survivors. If the group is fighting well, the difficulty will ramp up. When the group starts to falter, the director again adjusts accordingly. This dynamic nature of the campaign system makes the game both more exciting and less predictable.

The Game Engine

Left 4 Dead runs on Valve's venerable Source engine, which also powers other Valve games such as Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, and Portal, among others. Source is a DX9 engine, and does not currently support DX10. Thus, Left 4 Dead is a DX9 only game. Of course, it will run on Windows Vista systems equipped with DX10, but it will not make use of DX10's features. Source is a massively powerful and complex software package. Interested parties can look at Valve's Source Brochure (link to PDF) for more information on the engine.

There are a few new graphical features compared to Half-Life 2 that we can expect out of Left 4 Dead. According to this page there is included support for multi-core processors. There is physics-based animation in use on things like Boomer’s jiggly belly, flexible hair and floppy bits of clothing, and a new particle system. There is also something new in the game being dubbed “Extended HDR” which uses high precision floating point calculations for the HDR effects.

The most important thing to consider here is that Source is a veteran game engine and so games based upon it should perform quite well on modern hardware.

The Video Cards

For this gameplay evaluation, we have chosen six of today’s newest and hottest video cards with which to examine Left 4 Dead's performance.

From NVIDIA, we have a GeForce GTX 280 with 1GB of GDDR3, an original GeForce GTX 260 with 192 shader cores and 896MB of GDDR3, and an updated GeForce GTX 260 with 216 shader cores and also with 896MB of GDDR3.

From AMD, we have the dual-GPU ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 with 1GB of GDDR5 memory per GPU, a Radeon HD 4870 with 1GB of GDDR5 , and a Radeon HD 4870 with 512MB of GDDR5.

These six products comprise the performance mainstream and enthusiast classes of video cards from both AMD and NVIDIA and their respective partners.