Left 4 Dead 2 - DirectX 9 / AMD HD3D

Like the original, Left 4 Dead 2 is set during the aftermath of an apocalyptic pandemic, and focuses on four survivors fighting against hordes of the infected. The survivors must fight their way through levels, interspersed with safe houses that act as checkpoints, with the goal of reaching a rescue vehicle at the campaign's finale. The gameplay is procedurally altered by an artificial intelligence engine dubbed the "Director" that monitors the players' performance and alters the scenario to provide a dynamic challenge for the players as they progress. Several new features have been introduced, such as new types of infected, melee weapons, and a story-arc that connects each of the game's five campaigns together.

Testing was performed at 1920x1080 8aa 16af with 3D enabled.

When testing AMD 3D and NVIDIA 3D Vision we are quite limited in the scenarios where the two can be compared. This is due to the limitations of AMD's implementation which uses 3rd party drivers to enable the 3D effect. These 3rd party drivers lack the support and polish of the NVIDIA alternative and since we began testing this aspect of AMD cards around 8 months ago the situation has not improved significantly.

So we opted for Left 4 Dead 2 as our comparison as it is one of the few games we have seen work on AMD and NVIDIA hardware in 3D. We are using the iZ3D driver which costs $30 after the initial 30 day trial for this test as it gave us the best results on AMD.

For single screen stereoscopic 3D gaming the Gigabyte SOC gives us great framerates in L4D2 and an overall better experience than the AMD card.