Legit Reviews

 

Sequel to Valve Corporation's award-winning Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2 involves the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic. There has been an outbreak of a pathogen that causes infected humans to behave like zombies. The four survivors have to fight their way through the hordes of infected, using safe houses along the way to rest and recover in order to reach extraction points. This takes place in the southern United States, featuring Savannah, GA and New Orleans, LA.

For L4D2 we used the highest possible settings with 8x MSAA and 8x AF. VSYNC was disabled and multicore rendering was enabled. We used FRAPS to record frame rates during a full play-through of the "Hard Rain" campaign's "Mill Escape" level, pictured above. We are including L4D2 for DirectX 9 level comparison as all the other tests will be running DirectX 11 with the exception of Furmark running OpenGL and 3DMark Vantage as DirectX 10. Hard Rain is my favorite campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 because it simulates hurricane Katrina (though you can still walk, just slower in flooded areas) limiting visibility with dense rain which very few games attempt- pictured above.

The ECS GeForce GTX 460 1GB handles this game very easily, beating out the mix crossfire configuration at both resolutions. This game is the only DirectX 9 based test we will be running, so take this as a comparison of cards if you only plan on playing games running that API.