Benchmark Results: Left 4 Dead
At 1680x1050, Left 4 Dead is entirely CPU-bound. Adding CrossFire or SLI only results in lower frame rates. We do get a great sense for how clock speed affects this game, though—at least between the three Core i5/i7 CPUs. The trio is favored, to be sure. And although the Core i5-750 features a more aggressive Turbo Boost implementation than the Core i7-920, it isn’t able to usurp the X58-based platform. Interesting also is that the ATI and Nvidia cards score identically. The bottleneck couldn’t get any more pronounced.
The competition opens up a little bit at 2560x1600. With a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 installed, AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 actually takes a first place finish, followed by the three Nehalem-based chips. With a GeForce GTX 285, all five platforms perform almost the same, notably slower than ATI’s flagship.
Drop in a second GeForce GTX 285, though, and Nvidia overtakes ATI, if only by a sliver. The Core i7-870, with its 2.93 GHz base clock, proves to be the fastest. Of course, even the lowest result in this chart is ridiculously quick. There’s no reason leave anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering disabled in Left 4 Dead.
There’s a slight benefit to adding CrossFire or SLI at 1680x1050 with more visual detail applied, but certainly not enough to warrant buying a second graphics card. Again, the Core i7-870 takes a first place finish in this one.
At 2560x1600, with 4xAA and 8xAF enabled, all five platforms turn back the same results with a single Radeon HD 4870 X2 installed. The same happens when you sub-in a GeForce GTX 285, though the Nvidia card is quite a bit slower. Nvidia takes off with the addition of SLI though, sailing past a pair of Radeon HD 4870 X2s. ATI’s cards pick up performance too, but they don’t scale nearly as well.
Even though the cards on our P55-based platforms only get eight lanes of PCI Express connectivity each, the Core i5 and Core i7 systems still manage to out-perform the Core 2 Quad and Phenom II machines under the influences of CrossFire.
Interesting..whilst the Phenom II is a refined core rather than a new design, it still seems able to hold it's weight. It's also apparent that even the fastest Core i5's and i7's are getting some great results not from nVidia cards, but from AMD/ATI.
^ Source: single-card configurations, i.e. what most people can afford.
"Running at 1680x1050 represents a solid baseline for mainstream gamers, while 2560x1600 serves as today’s Holy Grail."
With so many people attaching their PCs to 1080p TVs why do we consistenly see a lack of 1920x1080 resolution results? Besides, many people still use top quality 17" & 19" monitors with 1280x1024 resolutions.
@up:
At 1280x1024 you sure as hell don't need Tri SLI 285 or CrossfireX 4870x2. In fact single 4850 will do.
This makes me rethink my whole i5/i7 upgrade at the first of the year.
I'm guessing my Q6600 @3.6 is alittle faster then the Q9550 used in the tests.
Maybe a i5 and 2x4770 GPU might do some good at a very low price?
the Q9550 was only clocked @ 2.83GHz, they should atleast used the Q9650 or OC the Q9550 to 3.4GHz like the PII 965
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@kasperg
then why not clock the i7 920 to 4GHz and all of the others accordingly?