Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.4 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field. Unlike most triple-A games that were launched late in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only uses a DirectX 9.0 renderer and, given the realistic nature of the graphics, it proves that there's still life left in the old dog!

For our gameplay testing, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game. All of the in-game settings were set to their maximum values, including texture details which were configured to 'Extra'. The 'Dual Video Cards' option was enabled for the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations, but was disabled in all single GPU configurations.

Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.






The Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Atomic started off reasonably well in Call of Duty 4. While it was no match for the GeForce 8800 GT, it delivered similar minimum frame rates across the board, but the average frame rates were lower. In some cases, the deficit was enough to be the difference between smooth and not-so-smooth, but in others you would be hard-pushed to tell the difference.

We were quite content with the game running at either 1920x1200 0xAA or 1680x1050 4xAA, but at any higher settings, the game started to become a little less smooth, with average frame rates getting very close to the 30 fps mark. The real target though is the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB, which is quite a bit faster—both with and without anti-aliasing enabled.