Call of Duty: World at War

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty: World at War is Treyarch’s controversial World War II shooter set on the Pacific and Eastern fronts, where you switch roles between an American Marine and a Russian soldier who survives Stalingrad and follows the push into Berlin at the end of the war.

World at War uses a beefed up version of the proprietary engine used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was developed by Infinity Ward and has easily been the most successful game in the series. It uses the DirectX 9.0 renderer exclusively and features true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field amongst other things.

We used the full retail version of the game downloaded from Steam, which was patched to version 1.3.1080 and for our gameplay testing, we did a 90-second manual run through from the second mission in the game where you are part of a beach landing in the Pacific. It appears to be one of the more intensive parts of the game with lots of explosions, water, smoke and lighting effects thrown in for good measure.

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: World at War has favoured Nvidia cards pretty heavily since its introduction, so the fact that the Radeon HD 4770 is faster than the GeForce 9800 GT can only mean good things. With anti-aliasing enabled, the Radeon is actually not too far (around eight to ten percent) behind the GeForce GTS 250 512MB. With anti-aliasing disabled though, that gap extends to 20 percent at 1,920 x 1,200 and 27 percent at 2,560 x 1,600.

Admittedly, you’re unlikely to game at 2,560 x 1,600 on a Radeon HD 4770, but it is interesting to see how these cards scale when the workload increases drastically.