Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly set up.

This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. Also, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black.

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 it's 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 it's 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

We'll do three charts per test session / game today. Above the results for a single and two cards in SLI. That is your scaling performance. And Oh my gosh, look at that --  that's 1.9x scaling performance (!)

In the second chart we'll compare the GTX 460 768MB in SLI and then the R5830 setup in Crossfire. Remember, both cards have the very latest driver and the R5830 has the ATI CrossFireX Application Profiles patch active and installed. A clear win for NVIDIA, SLI scales the best with two cards that are cheaper and less noisy as well.

The third chart is as always a comparative chart, a performance chart if you will. Dark orange is the SLI test, in light orange, the single card. As much as we could we added other SLI and Crossfire tests in these charts BUT and I do want to make this clear, these were done with slightly older drivers. For the Radeon that was 10.5 I think.

But again the GTX 460 was tested with 258.80 and the R5830 used the latest 10.6 WHQL driver with CrossFireX Application Profiles patch.

Have a look at the 450 USD GeForce GTX 480 and now compare it to the GTX 460 SLI 768MB on which we spend 400 USD in total.