BFG's GTX 295 H2OC: Water-Cooled Graphics
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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 our two resolutions with shaders set to "High" at 1680x1050 and "Very High" for 1900x1200. 8xQ and 16xQ FSAA were used for the NVIDIA cards; 8x box tent and 8x wide tent took care of our Radeon 4870X2. All test results were gathered by playing through the entire finale of the "Dead Air" campaign. |
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The performance pattern here generally follows the established curve—BFG's GTX 295 is a bit faster than the standard model, which in turn is faster than the Radeon 4870X2. Enabling wide-tent AA on the Radeon card hits performance badly, but the game remains playable at max detail levels on all the video cards we tested.
