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 1.6 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: Modern Warfare turns things around and both the 1GB and 512MB versions of the ATI Radeon HD 4870 are faster than Zotac's GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! Edition at lower resolutions. However, because the frame rates are high there is no strict benefit to the additional performance in this title at lower settings.

Having said that, when you start pushing the resolution up to 2,560 x 1,600, the pre-overclocked Zotac GeForce GTX 260 AMP²! trades blows with the 4870 1GB. The Zotac GTX 260 AMP²! Edition is less than half a frame per second faster than the HD 4870 1GB with 2xAA enabled, but the latter manages to stretch out a two frames per second advantage once 4xAA is applied.