VGA performance: Left 4 Dead (DX9)

Left 4 Dead

A new and highly virulent strain of the rabies virus emerges and spreads throughout the human population with frightening speed. The pandemic's victims become grotesquely disfigured widely violent psychopaths, attacking the uninfected on sight. As one of the "lucky" few apparently immune to the sickness, you, unfortunately, are also trapped in a city crawling with thousands of the bloodthirsty Infected. Alone, you're dead. But together with a handful of fellow survivors, you might just fight your way to safety.

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.

It's daunting we know, but in the above chart you can observe the results taken at 8x AA (multi-sampled) and 16x AF. We'll enabled heavy anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is maxed out as any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. Since we are dealing with a budget card... well 1024x768 would be possible. But check out the next chart.

Surprisingly, 8x AA at 1024x768 is playable. If you compromise a little to 2x AA you'll have a lot more bandwidth (resolution wise) to play in and even 1680x1050 comes within range.