I’ve been playing Valve’s brilliant co-op based shooter, Left 4 Dead, since its launch back in November. Although its visuals aren’t quite as stunning, as say, Call of Duty 5 or Far Cry 2, the game features great style, atmosphere and game play that has made it a must-have game for PC gamers (or Mac gamers that use Bootcamp, like me).

Letting the game choose its graphic settings is not a terrible idea, but you will notice some choppiness when the action ramps up – which is often in this game! Thus, I would recommend turning off FSAA and lowing the resolution from the default 1440 x 900 to 1280 x 768. Furthermore, I would tweak the shader, model, and texture settings to meet your personal needs. As you can see from the video, I’ve found a combination of settings that I like, but if I was playing L4D on expert campaign mode, I’d probably lower the settings further.

Many MacBook Pro owners seem to choose a combination of medium to high settings when playing Left 4 Dead, and many of them choose to keep the native 1440 x 900 resolution. Whatever choices you settle on, just keep in mind that the newer unibody MacBook Pro’s comes with the faster 9600M GT CPU (the old models have the slower 8600M GT), and this should let you play most games at decent frame rates with graphics similar to what you’d find on a Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.