Left 4 Dead

What works

Everything involved in single player.

Guns shoot. Zombies die. Items work. New levels load properly. As far as I can tell - everything works.

What does not

Frame rate is very poor (10-20fps - lowest settings at any resolution directX 9), but seems nearly identical on both my Macbook Pro (Intel Core2 Duo 2.2ghz, GeForce 8600M GT, 1G RAM), and desktop (Intel quad core 2.6ghz, 9800 gtx2, 2G RAM).

I find that performance almost never dips below 10 fps, suspiciously so considering how different those two systems are. Can anyone confirm this with more tests? The game runs fairly reliably for me at 10fps. This seems very odd to me.

I found little to no mouse lag like someone else did. The primary performance issue was frame rate for me on both systems.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Multiplayer - performance was so poor that I didn't bother to try multiplayer. I'll test that once I can get the singleplayer to run reasonably well.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I made no adjustments to graphics through the console for two reasons. One, most of those commands require you to turn cheats on which would render multiplayer unplayable, and, two, considering the curious issue with the 10 fps frame rate floor, I suspect they will not resolve the issue.

To change startup settings, right-click on the game in Steam, select "Properties, then "Set launch options...". You can add any of the following options, seperated by a space.

• -novid - Prevent the startup video from running. Not necessary, but gets you to the menu faster.

If you have multiple screens, you'll probably find that the game tries to stretch over all screens, instead of just one. In this case, you'll need these options:

• -height - Sets the window height. For example, "-height 900".
• -width - Sets the window width. For example, "-width 1440".
• -windowed - Not necessary, but starts the game in a window. Nice for if you want to move it to a different screen.