DX9: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

So here's where we dive into our regular benchmarks.

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

I decided for the upper chart to include a flurry of graphics cards. Next to the EVGA GTX 690 you will spot a GTX 670 in SLI and for scaling reasons a GeForce GTX 680.

The choice to include two 670 SLI cards might be a little controversial but really, two of these puppies perform real close to the GTX 690 and lowest pricing currently is 366 EUR a piece thus 732 EUR where the cheapest GTX 690 is 925 EUR.

I would strongly like to suggest you stay focused at 2560x1600 as that's really the best indicator for performance. Above however 1920x1200.

On each page we'll also include a comparative chart with multi-GPU solutions.