When a game from Valve is released it is a huge deal. And although with the Episodes being released and other constituents of Valve doing work with TF2, Portal, etc, this seems to be occurring at a quicker pace it still isn't all the time. The newest one is about to come out next week and a demo was released earlier, Left 4 Dead. The project started in the hands of Turtle Rock Studios who have been used by Valve a lot previously but the developer was acquired and is now officially a part of Valve.

Left 4 Dead uses the Source engine and thus benchmarking is very familiar. Simply use record command at the console and then timedemo to play back the demo you recorded. We recorded a section where there are swarms and swarms of zombies attacking you in the streets that don't seem to let up.

Here is our test system.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Ultimate SP1 32-bit. ATI Catalyst 8.10 drivers were used and Forceware 180.43.

Our settings were set to the highest possible except we went for 8XMSAA and 16XAF with "Very High" or "High" whichever was the highest where possible.

Things fall pretty much where we expect. This is the most advanced Source engine game to date though and it still is a demo so scores might seem a little low for some of the more advanced hardware that we have. There is a gradual step down for all the lower-end cards though until we get the to the GeForce 9500 GT and 8600 GTS which are unplayable at this high settings. However, they should be more than playable at more mid-range settings.

The GTX 280 only loses 3fps at 1920x1200 showing that it's probably CPU bound. Cards appear a bit more staggered here and once you hit the Radeon HD 4670 you dip below 30fps if just barely. Again though this was an intense demo and we think it's probably acceptable for most people. So for a $70 card you can play Left 4 Dead basically maxed out at 1920x1200.

We see a major dip here for the memory limited GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. There's just no way it can handle this resolution, the same for our GeForce 8600 GTS which only has 256MB of RAM. If you're playing on playing this resolution you'll definitely want a 4800 card or a GTX 260 and up.

Conclusion:

Left 4 Dead definitely seems to be less forgiving than the previous episode of Half-Life 2 but as with other Source engines this is still one of the faster and more scalable engines on the market due to still being low-tech compared to Unreal 3 or Crysis. That said the art direction and other flourishes make up for that greatly and give the game the patented Valve sense of style.