Saturday, November 7th, 2009

Pinned! Now with higher FPS...

Owing to various laws and classification arrangements, Valve will be releasing two versions of their upcoming zombie thriller sequel Left 4 Dead 2. At least in Australia and Germany, the game will only officially be released in a censored form, with milder levels of gore, and fewer body parts. Whilst the versions are entirely compatible, as far as I understand it the bought version is entirely distinct, so players wanting the full version should make sure to buy their copies abroad if they don’t want to end up with a crippled version in their Steam accounts. Fortunately, one of the advantages of Steam, is that the game really can be bought abroad without ever having to leave the country—at least until the political animal catches up with that loophole and forces a stop to it!

However, the censorship leveled at gamers in those countries does at least bring with it a modicum of solace. Tests over at PC Games Hardware have shown that the censored version of the game demo runs perhaps up to FORTY PERCENT faster than the uncut version. Which makes a lot of sense, when you consider the extra gore and body parts the latter has to contend with.

For our benchmarks we use a 60 second real-time demo sequence which takes place in the park from the second chapter of the “The Parish” Campaign. In the scene we have several Bommers and a Splitter [sic] as well as a lot of ordinary enemies. We use a Radeon HD 5870 to display the demo at 1680 x 1050 with maximal details, 4x MSAA and 16:1 AF. So all in all the setting is quite challenging for the CPU.

The direct comparison between cut an uncut version reveals huge differences in performance. It doesn’t matter if we use a dual-core E6600 or quad-core Q6600 processor, the less violent version of the demo runs about 40 percent faster that the uncut version. Furthermore the difference between the two uncut results (dual-core vs. quad-core) is bigger, too, what indicates a higher CPU workload.

Since the games are entirely interoperable online, that could be giving underpowered players in the affected countries something of a decent advantage when it comes to tackling their equally equipped opponents from the rest of the world. But for those living in sensible countries, all is not lost. At least they have the option of turning the gore levels down themselves!

Tags: australia, germany, left 4 dead 2
Posted in Games, Left 4 Dead | No Comments »