Left 4 Dead Video Settings

Right then, because we're typically showered in silicon from our friends at AMD, Intel and Nvidia here at bit-tech we're pretty much kitted to the eyeballs in shiny toys to power our illustrious gaming experiences.

That said, being a Valve game, it's no surprise that pretty much anyone with Nvidia or ATI stamped on a black, green or red PCB from the last four years will be able to play Left 4 Dead at some level of graphical sexiness.

Just like Half-Life 2 was often CPU limited, the intense AI that controls hoards of zombies and all the physics caused by their interactions with the environment requires a whole lot of CPU horsepower. For example, if you're hosting a game while playing, even a 3GHz quad core can chug just a little in some circumstances.

Like other Source engine games, anti-aliasing does make Left 4 Dead look gloriously awesome. Applying 4x or even 8x MSAA (if you can stretch to it) is what you should aspire to, as you will no doubt be starting at your team mates or a football stadium full of undead fans of yours.


On low and medium there isn't much difference and when there is it's mostly in texture compression, which makes the text on the walls generally unreadable and despite being able to change the film grain option in the control panel, none is present. On low the model physics and general polygon count appear a little lower, but the textures still look good.

Scaling it up to high the film grain kicks in and adds a lovely touch when set to the recommended setting - it's well worth stretching to if you can afford to do it because it gives that extra, eerie edge. The model textures also have an added depth and the world is generally better lit with softer shadows. Setting shaders to Very High adds a slight motion blur and layers more specular lighting that again adds to the sense of realism, especially on the main character models.

While you can play without all the eye-candy on, for the full pant wetting experience, make sure you crank it all the way up and, if possible, add some AA in for good measure. Even a GeForce 8800 GT or 9800 GT can handle the game at a very high resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 with either 4x or 8x AA and Very High in-game quality settings, so most of our readers should be in good stead.


As you can see above - Francis gets more and more grumpy, and his tattoos are more and more defined as you increase the quality settings. Zoe's jacket also becomes more wrinkled and the detail in her face and hair improves as well as you increase the in-game options.

At distance the detail drops clearly - the Source engine has never been designed for this and as it's also a "limited" consolified game designed to work on the Xbox 360 and this has also affected Valve's design to a degree. However, Left 4 Dead doesn't really need extreme detail at distance - it's not Crysis, it's been designed for close, intense combat and it works great for that type of gameplay.