Date:
Monday , November 30, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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Borderlands Gameplay Performance and IQ

Borderlands is a colorful co-op shooter in more ways than one, coming to retail after a lengthy development cycle including at least one redesign. It uses a familiar graphics engine, but with some tweaks and upgrades which have brought with it some unexpected performance challenges. We play Borderlands with 9 of today's best video cards.

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Test System Setup

For our test system platform we are using an ASUS P6T6 WS Revolution motherboard with an Intel Core i7 920 overclocked to 3.6GHz, and 6GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600. For the power supply, we will be using a CoolerMaster Real Power Pro 1250W .

While it might be a bit "overkill," we use the 3.6GHz overclocked quad-core processor to mitigate any CPU-based bottlenecking that we may encounter by using a slower or less powerful CPU.

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Driver Setup

With both the NVIDIA and AMD video cards we will be using the latest drivers at the time of evaluation. For the NVIDIA video cards, we are using the ForceWare 195.50 Beta driver provided by NVIDIA. For the AMD/ATI video cards, we are using the Catalyst 8.663.1 Beta (Hemlock) driver from their website. All drivers are designated for use with Windows 7 64-bit.

Evaluation Method

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.