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 1.5 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 multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards.

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








Call of Duty 4 shows some big benefits for the GeForce 9800 GX2, while the GeForce 9800 GTX, GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB all deliver very similar performance. The GeForce 9800 GTX is always the fastest of the three, but usually by just a couple of frames per second. The other two cards switch places depending on the resolution and anti-aliasing setting.

Despite the fact the 9800 GTX is faster though, it's not faster by a significant amount--at least to the extent where the difference is smooth gameplay and unplayable frame rates. The 9800 GTX delivers optimal performance compared to the 8800 GTX when AA is disabled, or when only 2xAA is applied, as the gap there is around 10-15 percent. However, as soon as you enable 4xAA, the gap drops to just a few percentage points.

On the other hand, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 is just two to six percent slower across all of the scenarios we've recorded, including more that we haven't displayed results for here.