Australia isn't the only nation receiving a powercleaned version of Left 4 Dead 2. Germany, no doubt because of the killerspiele hysteria, has a similarly sanitized demo. But guess what, it also runs 40 percent faster.

PC Games Hardware benchmarked both the uncut Left 4 Dead 2 and the censored German demo using to a 60-second demo sequence from the second chapter of "The Parish." The sequence involves a ton of common infected as well as multiple Boomers and a Spitter. The setup: Radeon HD 5870 used to display the demo at 1680 by 1050 with maximum details, "4x MSAA and 16:1." I can't quote what that means exactly but "the setting is quite challenging for the CPU."

Here's what they found:

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 high