High-End Graphics Card Roundup

By Tino Kreiss
published

Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead is a first-person shooter in which protagonists hit, scratch, bite, and shoot their way through hordes of zombies. It uses an improved version of the Source Engine from Half Life 2 for visuals. The game also provides great support for multi-core CPUs and a low appetite for 3D effects. Together, these characteristics combine to deliver absolutely fluid viewing and fabulous frame rates.

Graphics quality was set to Very High for our High End tests, to produce maximum viewing quality. Our highest setting for AA was 8x. We used various time demos that feature the Survivor's Group engaged in close combat street fights with countless zombies to acquire our FRAPS data.

Tino Kreiss
111 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Only one ATi card? What happened to all those OC'd 4890s?
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  • And those HAWX benchmarks look ridiculous. ATi should wipe floor with nvidia with that. Of course you didn't put dx10.1 support on. Bastard...
    Reply
  • cangelini
    quarzOnly one ATi card? What happened to all those OC'd 4890s?
    These are the same boards that were included in the recent charts update, and are largely contingent on what vendors submit for evaluation. We have a review upcoming comparing Sapphire's new 1 GHz Radeon HD 4890 versus the stock 4890. It'll be up in the next couple of weeks, though.
    Reply
  • ohim
    Am i the only one that find this article akward since looking at the tests done on Ati cards on The Last Remnant game makes me wonder what went wrong ... i mean it`s UT3 engine ... why so low performance ?
    Reply
  • curnel_D
    Ugh, please tell me that The Last Remnant hasnt been added to the benchmark suite.

    And I'm not exactly sure why the writer decided to bench on Endwar instead of World In Conflict. Why is that exactly?

    And despite Quarz2's apparent fanboism, I think HAWX would have been better benched under 10.1 for the ATI cards, and used the highest stable settings instead of dropping off to DX9.
    Reply
  • anamaniac
    The EVGA 295 is the stuff gods game with.

    I would love that card. I would have to replace my whole system to work it properly however.
    I want $1500 now... i7 920 (why get better? They all seem to be godly overclockers) and EVGA 295.

    How about a test suit of the EVGA GTX 295 in crossfire for a quad-gpu configuration? I know there's driver issues, but it would be fun to see what it could do regardless. Along with seeing how far Toms can OC the EVGA GTX 295.
    Actually... Toms just needs to do a new system building recommendation roundup. I find them useful personally, and would have used it myself had my cash source had not lost his job...
    Reply
  • Weird test:
    1) Where are the overclocking results?
    2) Bad choice for benchmarks: Too many old DX9 based graphic engines (FEAR 2, Fallout 3, Left4Dead with >100FPS) or Endwar which is limited to 30FPS. Where is Crysis?
    3) 1900x1200 as highest resolution for high-end cards?
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  • EQPlayer
    Seems that the cumulative benchmark graphs are going to be a bit skewed if The Last Remnant results are included in there... it's fairly obvious something odd is going on looking at the numbers for that game.
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  • armistitiu
    Worst article in a long time. Why compare how old games perform on NVIDIA's high end graphic cards? Don't get me wrong i like them but where's all the Atomic stuff from Saphire, Asus and XFX had some good stuff from ATI too. So what.. you just took the reference cards from ATI and tested them? :| That is just wrong.
    Reply
  • pulasky
    WOW what a piece of s********** is this """"""review"""""" Noobidia pay good in this days.
    Reply