ATI Radeon HD 4890 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

Not too many game publishers can brag about having such a great track record like Valve can. None of their major game releases have ever been released to anything but praise, which goes to show that not rushing to release a game to please investors can make a huge difference. Take Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2 and Portal, for example.

Left 4 Dead is one game I didn’t take seriously up until its launch. After playing it though, my opinions changed drastically, and even as I type this, I feel like saving the document and going to play. But, I’m also scared of Zombies, so continue writing I shall. Like Dead Space, this game is a survival shooter, but unlike that game, this title focuses completely on co-op. For the most part, the game is dulled in single player, but team up with three of your friends and let the laughs and excitement begin.

The portion of the level we use for testing is contained within the No Mercy campaign. The ultimate goal in the entire campaign is to make it to the top of a hospital in order to be picked up and brought off to safety. Our run through takes place in the final part of the the campaign, which leads up towards the roof tops. If one thing can be said about this title, it’s that causing a Boomer to explode (as seen in the above screenshot) proves to be one of the most satisfying things to do in any game I’ve played in a while.

Continuing an obvious theme, NVIDIA’s card comes out on top again, although with this particular title, the differences are moot. Aside from the absolute lowest-end offerings, all of our GPUs were able to handle this game at 2560×1600 with 4xAA, which is impressive from many different standpoints.

Some of our results in the graphs above suggest that some improvements have been made to NVIDIA’s drivers since we last benchmarked their highest-end cards, as the GTX 275 creeps past the GTX 285 in some cases. If we crank the Anti-Aliasing to 8xMSAA, nothing changes – the GTX 275 once again topples the GTX 285. In fact, so does the HD 4890! Though 8xMSAA is hardly that important, it’s nice on the ego to enable it and still see incredible framerates.