Left 4 Dead PC - 23 VGA card graphics performance

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The Game and a 101

Left 4 Dead is a game that venerates zombie movies throughout the ages, from George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, with that scenery in mind you can start up this game. In the game, you and up to three other survivors must battle a zombie apocalypse with a simple goal; you aren't trying to eradicate the undead horde, you're just trying to survive.

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:

GeForce GTX 280 3xSLI
GeForce GTX 280 SLI
GeForce GTX 260 C216 SLI
GeForce GTX 280 1024MB
GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB
GeForce GTX 260 C216
GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB
GeForce 8800 Ultra 768MB
GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB
GeForce 9800 GT 512MB
GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
GeForce 9600 GT 512MB
GeForce 8600 GT 256MB
GeForce 7800 GTX 512MB
Radeon HD 4870 X2 CrossfireX
Radeon HD 4870 X2 2048MB
Radeon HD 4870 CrossfireX
Radeon HD 4870 1024MB
Radeon HD 4870 512MB
Radeon HD 4850 512MB
Radeon HD 4830 512MB
Radeon HD 4670 512MB
Radeon HD 3870 512MB

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.

Left 4 Dead VGA Graphics card performance

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.

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