DX9: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 is set five years on from COD4 and brings a new villain into town: Vladimir Makarov. All the trouble start when Makarov frames the US for a terrorist attack on a Russian airport (yes, the infamous airport level). The rest of the story follows the same intertwined British and US mission format as before, and the missions are all incredible set-pieces that involve storming oil rigs, climbing icy cliffs and, of course, an adrenaline packed snowmobile chase. Visually the 3D engine seems to be the same as the COD4 one, it's tweaked and nearly abused to push out the very best of its capability. The result is a very decent looking game really, smoke, fog, sun, vegetation detailed texturing of objects, buildings and characters. 

Our image quality settings selected are the most complex you can set in-game. 4x AA, maxed out anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is enabled to its maximum capability. Any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Image Quality setting:

• Level Contingency
• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

And as you are used to, a performance chart that was recently introduced in all our graphics card reviews at 1920x1200 resolution.

Unfortunately, the first three titles in the benchmarks are not the most impressive games for the R7970 really. Hang in there for a second, things will change dramatically.