When an earthquake occurs, the structure will enter into a nonlinear stage; therefore, new approaches based on nonlinear analysis are needed to flourish with the purpose of more realistic investigations on seismic behavior and destruction mechanism of structures. According to the modern philosophy, “Performance-based Earthquake Engineering” is formed in which simple nonlinear static analyses are mostly used in order to determine the structure’s behavior in nonlinear stage. This method assumes that the structure response is only controlled by the main mode and the shape of this mode will remain the same, while it enters the nonlinear stage. Both of these assumptions are approximations, especially in high buildings, which have a long period. It seems that constant load pattern used in these methods cannot consider all of the effects properly. In this paper, an attempt was made to study the accuracy of these methods in comparison to nonlinear dynamic analysis, by considering various load patterns existing in FEMA, also load patterns proportional to higher modes in nonlinear static method, and employing an approximative method of MPA modal analysis, study the accuracy of these methods in comparison to nonlinear dynamic analysis. For this purpose, three steel frames of 4, 8, and 12-stories with steel shear wall have been studied.