Overall, Guru3D likes Left 4 Dead. It combines mindless zombie action with tactical depth, hilarity with frustration and truly excellent moments every single time you play. Absolutely sparkling.

Graphics wise the Source Engine that powers the game may not be as cutting edge as other graphics engines anymore, but it does a great job at rendering a variety of environments that are packed with detail and clutter. And the lighting system is incredible; this game has some of the best flashlight mechanics since Doom III. You'll be in a pitch black dark room and the only illumination comes from the small cone of light from your flashlight. The light is attached to the muzzle of the gun so when you reload the cone of light shifts to the ceiling.

A little 101 on what we are doing.

Next to Far Cry 2, COD5: World at War, Brothers in Arms and a couple of others, Left 4 Dead is one of the most anticipated gaming titles of this season. Therefore we wanted to show you how the game runs on modern age graphics cards. This way, you can look at the performance versus resolution and make any decisions based on that information. Doubtful however is that you need to upgrade your graphics card since the game engine is based on the Half Life 2 engine model.

For this scene we are in the woods, closing in on a bridge. It is a pleasurable level to play, there's a lot going on. When the level loads up you immediately notice dense vegetation, fog, decent amount of shaders, volumetric smoke, heaps of objects, atmospheric lighting. All in all one of the somewhat heavy on the GPU levels.

But with an aging Half Life 2 engine, any decent affordable graphics card will allow you to enable 4xAA and 16xAF, easily.

Our image quality settings are the most complex you can set in-game. We'll test both 8x and 4x Multisample AA, we'll enable heavy anisotropic filtering, the best textures, every thing is maxed out as any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Here's an overview of the cards that we used to test the game with:

So we picked no less than twenty-three graphics card configurations, ranging from last year's mid-range to the current high-end graphics cards. For this test we opted for mid-range and high-end graphics cards.

The good news is that the Half Life 2 engine is dated, that's good news because it will allow current drivers to support the game for CrossfireX and SLI users.

Valve made sure it's playable on pretty much any modern graphics card. Do not be afraid to select anything and everything you can. Here's our selected graphics settings.