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 1.4 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 Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations, but was disabled in all single GPU configurations.

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






In Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the roles reverse and things aren't quite so impressive for the PowerColor Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme PCS 512MB, as it falls behind the GeForce 8800 GS in all tests. This is especially true when anti-aliasing is enabled, as this title unfortunately shows up the R600 architecture's lacklustre AA performance that crops up in certain scenarios.

Irrespective of this though, PowerColor's factory-overclocked HD 3850 sits right in between the Radeon HD 3850 256MB reference card and the Radeon HD 3870 reference card. And, what's more, the price point is almost right in between the two as well – that's quite a fine balancing act.