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
1680x1050, 4xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP!
ATI Radeon HD 4850
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
95.5
60.0
87.5
51.0
86.2
50.0
80.1
46.0
79.3
43.0
75.8
51.0
73.6
43.0
66.5
43.0
65.6
38.0
63.7
36.0
49.4
32.0
0
25
50
75
100
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Call of Duty 4
1920x1200, 0xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 4850
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
123.6
68.0
107.0
60.0
106.0
58.0
105.7
56.0
105.4
57.0
87.9
48.0
87.7
59.0
87.1
49.0
76.7
47.0
64.3
39.0
0
25
50
75
100
125
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Call of Duty 4
1920x1200, 4xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
ATI Radeon HD 4850
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
77.6
45.0
77.5
28.0
77.0
45.0
72.2
42.0
70.8
40.0
66.0
53.0
57.0
34.0
55.1
35.0
53.1
32.0
39.1
24.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Call of Duty 4
2560x1600, 0xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 4870
ATI Radeon HD 4850
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
95.2
54.0
79.5
44.0
79.0
42.0
76.1
42.0
74.9
35.0
63.6
36.0
61.1
34.0
58.2
39.0
50.9
29.0
43.5
28.0
0
25
50
75
100
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Call of Duty 4
2560x1600, 2xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 4850
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
66.5
39.0
58.4
36.0
57.7
35.0
56.3
32.0
55.0
35.0
44.3
28.0
44.3
29.0
41.8
26.0
36.2
22.0
32.8
20.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Call of Duty 4
2560x1600, 4xAA, 16xAF, DX9, Maximum Detail
Asus GeForce GTX 280 TOP
BFG GeForce GTX 280 OCX
EVGA GTX 280 Superclocked
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
Nvidia Geforce 9800 GX2
ATI Radeon HD 4870
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
ATI Radeon HD 4850
Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX+
ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2
55.3
32.0
51.4
31.0
51.1
30.0
49.0
29.0
43.8
16.0
40.3
18.0
39.5
24.0
35.2
21.0
35.0
20.0
24.2
15.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Again, the EVGA GeForce GTX 280 places slightly ahead of the stock GeForce GTX 280 and a little behind the higher overclocked cards in most of our Call of Duty 4 benchmarks. The couple of results where it places below the stock card can be put down to the slight differences between benchmark runs due to our real world playtest methods, but the minimum FPS is nearly always higher with the EVGA giving a slightly smoother gameplay.