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.

Call of Duty has without a doubt gone from a good franchise on the PC to hitting the absolute mainstream with the success of Call of Duty 4, up there with Halo 3 in sales and awareness. Activision seems to be milking the franchise yearly as well as they tend to do with all their franchises and so far at least it hasn't suffered greatly although Treyarch usually isn't up there with Infinity Ward. Call of Duty: World at War, the follow-up to Call of Duty 4, hits two weeks from now but a multiplayer PC beta was released today. We as usual decided to test it on a range of video cards to see how the latest in the series performs.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Ultimate  SP1 32-bit we used FRAPS on the Makin multiplayer map, running the same path without any other players to have accurate and repeatable results. Catalyst drivers 8.10 were used and the beta 180.43 Forceware drivers.

Graphic settings set to their highest possible settings in all categories except anti-aliasing which was left at 4X.

There are some definite conclusions we can draw from these early scores. First of all, it looks like this build of the Call of Duty engine is not yet optimized for ATI's graphic cards. Some might recall that originally a while back AMD's Radeon cards struggled with Call of Duty 4 until a better driver release came out. The Radeon 4850 definitely should not be below a GeForce 8800 GT even if it is overclocked. Unfortunately, all of our Nvidia cards are but at most that yields 8-10% gains. The benchmarks are very accurate and it isn't surprising to see that the game isn't fully optimized yet on ATI's front. Call of Duty 4 is one of the games where AMD cards currently excel, whether the 3850 or 4870X2 but here we see the 4870X2 barely stop a GeForce GTX 280. We wonder whether there is Crossfire support in this build of the game yet as well which so far we doubt.

Conclusion:

We'll do more testing tomorrow with some older and not as high-end cards but for now enjoy these. Nvidia is definitely in the driver's seat now with Call of Duty: World at War which could be because of the Big Bang II beta drivers we used or it could be that simply ATI has not yet optimized for Call of Duty: World at War as they had not with Call of Duty 4 at launch. We believe that to be the case and hopefully the 8.11 drivers have some better performance for what is sure to be a popular first-person shooter.

 Every now and then there's a game that takes the PC gaming community by storm coming out of nowhere to rack up huge sales numbers in what people have been calling a dead market since the days of the PlayStation One and Nintendo 64. The one this year is Age of Conan, the MMORPG from Funcom, which has sold 500,00 copies since it's release to June 1st with undoubtedly many more sold since then. The company was best known for Anarchy Online and clearly have struck MMORPG gold with Age of Conan.

Age of Conan runs off the Dreamworld graphics engine which Funcom originally developed in 2000 for Anarchy Online. Funcom decided with Age of Conan to try and take this further and develop the engine more so to bring it up to date for gameplay, graphics, and more. This includes such things as Cheetah, their own renderer used to apply shadows to everything in game, SpeedTree which works on creating better quality graphics for foliage, and in the future Funcom plans to support Microsoft's DirectX 10 API. Currently Age of Conan only uses Microsoft's DirectX 9 so we'll be looking at that in our performance testing. Consensus all around though is that Age of Conan is a top tier MMORPG with a very advanced graphics engine so it's something we definitely wanted to benchmark.

We used FRAPS through a 40 second run through the game in an area without any other variables to adjust the frames per second. Here is our start position and then end.

Here is our test system.

ATI Catalyst 8.6 and nForce 159.17 drivers were used on Vista Ultimate SP1.

Start:

End:

Here are our graphic settings for the game.

As you can see we ran at fairly high quality settings.

Now onto the benchmark results.