AMD Radeon HD 6870 & 6850 Graphics Cards Debut

Left 4 Dead 2 Performance

Left 4 Dead 2
DirectX Gaming Performance


Left 4 Dead 2

Like its predecessor, Left 4 Dead 2 is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter that pits four players against numerous hordes of Zombies. Like Half Life 2, the game uses the Source engine, however, the visual in L4D 2 are far superior to anything seen in the Half Life universe to date. The game has much more realistic water and lighting effects, more expansive maps with richer detail, more complex models, and the list goes on and on. We tested the game at various resolutions with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled and all in game graphical options set to their maximum values.

The new Radeon HD 6870 and HD 6850 beat the GeForce GTX 470 and stock GTX 460, respectively, in our custom Left 4 Dead 2 benchmark, by the slimmest of margins. The comparable Radeon HD 5800 series products took the lead over the new 6800 series parts, however.
 



 

6870

6850

5870

5850

GTX 470

GTX 460

% Increase

 39.8%

63.8% 

23.9% 

46.1% 

26.1% 

47.4% 

Left 4 Dead 2 was essentially CPU-bound when a second GPU entered the equation, which resulted in scaling scores that were all over the map. Any of the cards tested here can play L4D2 at max settings, with high framerates; using multiple GPUs simply pushes framerates over the top.


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