DX9 Zombies Are Still Scary Zombies
Left 4 Dead is the other title chosen for our DX9 benchmarks. This game was just recently released (recently being late last year), but it still manages to get by using the almost 5 year old Source engine. Like id Software in it’s heyday, this just goes to show the longevity of engines produced by Valve. Unfortunately the engine is old enough to not pose a challenge to the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card and it’s competitor. The numbers posted by either card were near perfectly matched.
Left 4 Dead really is the darling of the DX9 world. The game just looks wonderful, especially with everything cranked to max. Our testing consisted of playing back a demo recorded during a versus game consisting of myself, Eric Garay, and the crew from Fragapalooza. I would once again have to give the nod to the ATI hardware, as it just looked better on screen then the NVIDIA based gear.
DirectX 10 Testing
DirectX 10 based games are known for being able to lay brutal beating on graphics hardware, though the true benefit of the results may be questionable. That’s neither here nor there in this review, as we turn to two DX10 games from two different genres to see if we can put some distance between the GIGABYTE HD 4890 card we are reviewing and test bed NVIDIA card. The first game to be benchmarked is World in Conflict. This top down RTS title employs DX10 based graphics to render every unit and explosion in full 3D glory. So how did that all work out?
Not as well as I had hoped. I’m really wanting to see some sort of discernable difference between the GTX 260 I picked for a base unit, and the GIGABYTE HD 4890 we’re reviewing. I guess I picked my test subjects well, as the HD 4890 only just came in behind the overclocked GTX260 in the World in Conflict benchmark.
With all the claims of vastly improved image quality with DX10, the proof wasn’t really in the pudding until Crysis came along. If you could get powerful enough graphics hardware, you could set the game settings so high as to produce scenes that are near indistinguishable from real life. There was actually a screenshot going around the web that showed just this.
So with that in mind, I’m sorry to report that once again the race is a near dead heat between the NVIDIA test card and our ATI HD 4890 based review unit. In this benchmark, the overclocked GTX 260 overtook the HD 4890 by a very slight margin. This was with everything cranked to very high running at the resolutions noted above.