GTX 480 vs. HD 5870, 8x AA Performance Analysis, Part 3
Left 4 Dead
Left 4 Dead (L4D) is a 2008 co-op first-person shooter that was developed by Turtle Rock Studios and purchased by Valve Corporation during its development. Left 4 Dead uses Valve’s proprietary Source engine .
Left 4 Dead is set in the aftermath of a worldwide pandemic which pits its four protagonists against hordes of the infected zombies. There are four game modes: a single-player mode in which your allies are controlled by AI; a four-player, co-op campaign mode; an eight-player online versus mode; and a four-player survival mode. In all modes, an artificial intelligence (AI), dubbed the “Director”, controls pacing and spawns, to create a more dynamic experience with increased replay value. It is best as a multiplayer game with humans.
There is no built in benchmark, so we used ABT Senior Editor BFG10K’s custom time demo which is very repeatable. The game is updated regularly by Steam and we chose the highest detail settings and 4xAA. First we test at 2560×1600 resolution.
Now the GTX 480 is beaten by HD 5870 although both cards give completely playable framerates at the highest resolution and with 8xAA. We head on to our next chart at 1920×1200:
We note the same thing. Let’s move on to 1680×1050 resolution:
Generally, the HD 5870 takes the lead in Left 4 Dead and only is it beaten at 4xAA at 1680×1050. However, we note that for playing Source engine games, a HD 4870 or GTX 260+ is usually plenty.
Please take into consideration that nVidia uses a different version of AntiAliasing starting 8x and up, therefore comparisons are henceforth limited at best. Sadly I don’t have a direct link right now, but please take it into consideration before drawing (final) conclusions.
We took special care to make sure that identical AA settings were applied in all of our benchmarks including for Crysis. We even noted that in the full retail game, Just Cause 2, that we observed the benchmark results showed the Radeon was running at 8xCSAA while the GeForce was 8xAA.
However, we have since learned from AMD that the benchmark results are wrongly identifying 8xMSAA as CSAA. The Radeon is actually running 8xMSAA and this minor issue will be addressed in a future patch.
Everything we test is “apples to apple” unless it is specified in the review.
Nice article man. Cheers
good