ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review

Name: ATI Radeon HD 5970 Dual-GPU Powerhouse Review - Page 8
Brand: ATI

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, November 18, 2009, 12:01 AM EDT

Left 4 Dead

DirectX Gaming Performance

Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is a co-operative, survival horror, first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios, which was purchased by Valve part-way into development. Like Half Life 2, the game uses the Source engine, however, the visual in L4D are far superior to anything seen in the Half Life universe to date. The game pits four Survivors of an apocalyptic pandemic against hordes of aggressive zombies. We tested the game at resolutions of 1,920 x 1,200 and 2,560 x 1,600 with 4x anti-aliasing and 16x anisotropic filtering enabled and all in game graphical options set to their maximum values.

Left 4 Dead is mostly CPU bound with the dual-GPU powered Radeon 5000 series configurations and the additional overhead introduced by CrossFire results in slightly lower framerates at 1920x1200. All of the cards we tested put up good numbers here, however. Even there there is a clear advantage for the dual-GPU powered configurations at the higher resolutions here, gamers would be hard pressed to notice the performance differences in this game. Time to move on to Left 4 Dead 2. Comes out tonight!

Tags: AMD, ATI, Radeon, Gaming, DirectX, graphics, GPU, PCI Express, PCIe, dx11, Eyefinity

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com