Left 4 Dead

Publisher: Steam

Left 4 Dead is Valve’s co-operative zombie splattering masterpiece, and is a strong candidate for PC Game of the Year. Players are pitted against hundreds of screaming, slavering infected in numerous post apocalyptic environments, ranging from an over run hospital to a ruined airport and the co-operative experience of fighting off the horde with a few friends is second to none.

Left 4 Dead uses a modified version of Valve’s in-house Source Engine, an engine well known for its ability to scale from low end right up to bleeding edge graphics technology. The game makes use of not only the highest level of character detail yet seen in a Source Engine game, but also numerous filmic effects like film grain, vignetting and HDR to make the game feel more like an interactive movie.
There are also the huge waves of psychotic infected that continually mob the players, and the handful of special infected that try and thwart the survivors attempts to escape.

For testing Left 4 Dead we use a custom timedemo recorded during one of the most dramatic moments in the game, the finale of the dead air campaign. With hundreds of infected, multiple attacks from boss zombies and plenty of fire and explosive effects, it’s a great test of what the Source Engine and Left 4 Dead can do.

All in game detail settings are set to their highest levels, with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering set from inside the game.








Performance in Valve's zombie splatterfest is very favourable for the GeForce GTX 295, and while all the multi-GPU solutions perform very similarly, the GTX 295 is comfortably able to outperform the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in every single test by a margin of around five frames per second.

Adding a second GTX 295 is very disappointing though, with very limited scaling and a limited performance advantage as the frame rate becomes bottlenecked elsewhere. However, it does manage to outperform CrossFire 4870 X2s at resolutions above 1,680 x 1,050, even if the margin is only a few frames per second.