EVGA GeForce GTX 285 SSC Edition

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.

Valve’s releasing of games that both look great and run well on most machines is nothing new, with Left 4 Dead being the latest in their collection to be able to brag about such a thing. That said, it doesn’t take a massive card to power this game, so the GTX 285 of course cleans house.

One oddity I noticed during testing was that the 1680 and 1920 resolution results are much improved over what we experienced with the GTX 285 cards in our launch article. This goes far beyond the simple clock increase. I’m unsure of why there were huge increases this time around, but I’m lead to believe it was thanks to an update the game recently received, since backtracking to the same drivers we used for that article gave near-identical results.

Thanks to the recent boost in performance from the game (however it happened), the SSC edition pushed quite close to the GTX 295 with 8xMSAA at 2560×1600. In reality though, few are going to notice any real increase in performance over 60 FPS. That’s a good thing… pretty-much any mid-range card right now will offer enough performance to play one of the hottest games at its highest settings.