VGA performance: Left 4 Dead (DX9)

Left 4 Dead

A new and highly virulent strain of the rabies virus emerges and spreads throughout the human population with frightening speed. The pandemic's victims become grotesquely disfigured widely violent psychopaths, attacking the uninfected on sight. As one of the "lucky" few apparently immune to the sickness, you, unfortunately, are also trapped in a city crawling with thousands of the bloodthirsty Infected. Alone, you're dead. But together with a handful of fellow survivors, you might just fight your way to safety.

For this scene we are in the woods, closing in on a bridge. It is a pleasurable level to play, there's a lot going on. When the level loads up you immediately notice dense vegetation, fog, decent amount of shaders, volumetric smoke, heaps of objects, atmospheric lighting. All in all one of the somewhat heavy on the GPU levels.

With an aging Half Life 2 engine, every possible image quality setting in this game is maxed out. In the above chart you can observe the results taken at 8x AA (multi-sampled) and 16x AF. We'll enabled heavy anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is maxed out as any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Our image quality settings are the most complex you can set in-game. A healthy lead for the GTX 295. Again the ASUS takes a good lead.

Every possible image quality setting in this game is maxed out. And even at 8x AA the GTX 295 obviously delivers as promised. Very nice, but then again... this is the most high-end card your money can buy. So we'd expect nothing less, and neither should you.