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.






In Call of Duty 4, Zotac's GeForce 8800 GT AMP! Edition continues on from its impressive showing in Crysis, as it manages to perform fairly similarly to a reference design GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB across the board. In some scenarios, it wins, but Zotac's card falls behind by a whisker in the majority of the scenarios tested here.

At 1920x1200 4xAA, the card impressively manages to match BFGTech's factory overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB OC card. In comparison to the reference-clocked GeForce 8800 GT, there were some impressive gains to be had—pretty much across the board—and the frame rate differences were large enough for it to have a small impact on gameplay performance.