Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

Call of Duty 4. Is there anyone who doesn't like the game ? For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out

Since we already did the reference review with more cards compared I figured it would be nie to measure the difference 1:1 between the reference design GTX 280 and the slightly overclocked version from BFG.

For the sake of it I did throw in the results of a GeForce 9800 GTX as well.

• Green: BFG GeForce GTX 280 OC edition.
• Dark blue: Reference GeForce GTX 280
• Light blue: GeForce 9800 GTX

As you can see, the overclock does have a small effect on performance, but really not even noticeable to the naked eye. Let's hop onwards to Crysis.

The level where we measure and the image quality settings used

Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2

With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.

Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?

Image Quality setting:

• 0x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering

Same conditions here. In green the BFG card. A one frame increase here and there. Let's check image quality settings set at DX10 with high & very high settings as well.

So we have the reference card render at medium and very high image quality settings, and then the BFG card in very high IQ as well. Overall one FPS increase.

Shockingly for Crysis at these settings, that's actually considerable :)