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.

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Test Setup

We are using an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9770 CPU on an ASUS Blitz Extreme Motherboard and 4GB of OCZ Platinum Series DDR3-1600.

While it might be a bit of “overkill,” we use the QX9650 overclocked quad-core processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

We are overclocking our CPU from 3.2GHz to 3.6GHz (11x333) so that we can reduce any CPU limitations.

We are using the latest available drivers from NVIDIA and AMD at the time of evaluation. For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using driver version 180.48 WHQL. For the AMD video cards Cat 8.11 WHQL is being used.

We also have Service Pack 1 for Windows Vista installed.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.