As the year winds to a close, we're producing a series of articles that looks at graphics performance in the hottest Fall titles. We've already covered Far Cry 2, World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, and Call of Duty: World at War. Now, it's time for the zombie apocalypse with Left 4 Dead. Valve's four-player online cooperative shooter is based on their Source engine, a constantly evolving piece of technology that has added many features in the years since its debut in Half-Life 2. Still, it doesn't make use of DirectX 10.
Valve's commitment to making sure their games run well on a wide variety of PCs (not to mention the Xbox 360) means that Left 4 Dead (L4D) doesn't necessarily push modern high-end PC hardware all that hard. If you get up close to the zombies, you'll see they have fairly low polygon counts by today's standards, and the environments are fairly simple. All this is in service of keeping the game running well, with fancy lighting and shadows, even when there are dozens of zombies swarming at you and your comrades.
Our tests are run on the best sub-$200 and sub-$300 cards from ATI and Nvidia. That's the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX in the lower cost bracket, and the Radeon HD 4870 1GB and GeForce GTX 260 with 216 cores in the upper price bracket. Let's find out which cards are your best zombie-slaying friends. (full Story)
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