Left 4 Dead

The game runs on the Source engine and has an integrated benchmark, but the latter does not report the bottom speed information.

The game is far from demanding and the extra dozen frames per second at 2560x1600 we got by overclocking the Gigabyte card do not matter much. We can only say that the Gigabyte card proved to have the highest overclocking potential among the three tested products.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

To achieve a playable speed in this game we disabled FSAA and such resource-consuming options as Sun rays, Wet surfaces and Volumetric Smoke. We use the Enhanced full dynamic lighting (DX10) mode for our test and additionally enable the DirectX 10.1 mode for the ATI cards.

Overclocking does not help make the Radeon HD 4890 faster where it is necessary, i.e. at the resolutions of 1920x1200 and 2560x1600. The card gets faster than at the reference frequencies, but 19-22fps is not enough for the gamer to feel comfortable. If you’ve got a large monitor and want to play this game, you may want to consider the Radeon HD 5870 or, perhaps, the cheaper HD 5850.