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.








Prior to its removal from our benchmarks, the dual-GPU GeForce 9800 GX2 was a top performer in Call of Duty 4, so we had high hopes for the 9800 GTX+ SLI here and we certainly weren't disappointed! The two mid range cards in SLI dominate the performance charts with a performance advantage of up to fourteen percent over the Radeon HD 4870 X2, and it's only when anti-aliasing is enabled at the highest resolution of 2,560 x 1,600 that the 4870 X2 retakes the lead, and even then the pair of 9800 GTX+ cards still comfortably beat the GeForce GTX 280 by over ten percent!

The pair of HD 4850s also impress, although there's clearly a large performance gap, sometimes in excess of twenty percent, between them and 9800 GTX+ SLI set up until anti-aliasing is enabled at the highest of resolutions. However, the CrossFire config that costs just over £200 still outperforms any single GPU card that Nvidia is currently fielding, which is an enormously impressive achievement and bodes very well for the eventual arrival of the Radeon HD 4850 X2.