Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 13th November 2007
Comments (63) Stumble

Modern Awefare

So, you’ve probably clicked on a screenshot or two on your way to this point and in the process of doing so you’ve probably seen that the game looks rather spiffy... and all of this is done with DirectX 9.0. It’s not just got all the right bells and whistles – it then went out to get the lingerie to match and decided to bring its twin along as well.

The problem is that these screenshots were taken on our gaming system, which houses a GeForce 8800 GT and 2GB of RAM. That may be a little bit better than your PC, in which case you might not be able to images of the quality you’ve seen above.

So, what will you see? That’s what we’re going to look at next as we take a look at the most important graphics settings and see how the game looks when we fiddle with each one.

And for those of you who are interested, the packaging doesn’t list any recommended requirements for a system – it only offers the bare minimum. Apparently that means you’ll need an Nvidia GeForce 6600 / ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, a 2.4GHz P4 (or 1.8GHz dual-core), 512MB RAM and 8GB of disk space.

Depth of Field

Normally, depth of field isn’t an all-important feature – it’s just something nice to put on if you want. Depth of field as an effect is used to simulate the human eyes ability to focus on singular objects. To understand how it works try putting holding your hand in front of your face and looking at it – notice how stuff in the distance slips out of focus when you’re looking at something close?

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Graphics Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Graphics
Depth of field on (left) and off (right), click to enlarge

See what I mean? It’s a subtle effect and you need to look at the frame of the scope itself and not what you’re actually aiming at, but it makes a difference. In fact, considering how much of the game is spent with your gun to your eye, it makes a huge difference. Depth of field doesn’t have a huge effect on the gameplay or enjoyment, but it terms of immersion it’s one of the most important settings for the game. If you can turn it on then you should. Trust me – the only thing more important than depth of field is…

Texture Detail

Texture detail is the single most important setting in any game usually. It controls the textures of objects and terrain and, in case you didn’t realise, there tends to be a fair few of those two things on screen at once in a game like this. Texture detail is handled a bit oddly with Call of Duty 4 and breaks down into three subsections, each of which has four settings – low, normal, high and extra.

For simplicity, our screen shots keep the three sub-settings equal to form four total settings, of which we’re showing three.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Graphics Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Graphics Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Graphics
Texture detail extra (left), medium (center) and low (right), click to enlarge

Although the textures on the lower settings look on the ugly side of awful, it’s actually a good thing for Call of Duty 4 because, combined with the plentiful detail in the higher settings, it indicates a great deal of scalability in the game. On the low texture setting the game looks blurred out – as if somebody trod on your glasses and then poked you in the eye. With a sword. On the extra setting the game looks fantastic though and it’s possible to see all types of fine details – just look at that floor!

Flip the page to check out some of the other graphical settings which play an important role in Call of Duty 4…

Shopping



Stats: 0.022 seconds