VGA performance: Call of Duty 5: World at War | FEAR (DX9)

Call of Duty 5: World at War

The raid of Makin Island, one of the first levels, starts with you tied to a chair, faced with a smug Japanese general. He puffs cigar smoke in your face, before turning to one of your comrades and shouting appropriately phrased Japanese at him. The scene is set, and trust me, you'll be focused. World at War throws out the rulebook of war to transform WWII combat through a new enemy, new tactics and an uncensored experience of the climatic battles that gripped a generation. As U.S. Marines and Russian soldiers, players will employ new features like cooperative gameplay, and weapons such as the flamethrower in the most chaotic and cinematically intense experience to date.

Our image quality settings 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:

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

Now here's a title where the GTX 295 Quad SLI starts to show off. As you can see, for CrossfireX the two additional GPUs did not kick in. Bummer.

Scaling, when you compare a single GTX 295 towards the Quad SLI 295. We spot roughly a third more performance. That's the reality of multi-GPU scaling. It's a hard thing to achieve maximum scaling.

What about an older DX9 title then? Let's have a look at  F.E.A.R. - Perseus Mandate.

F.E.A.R. - Perseus Mandate

As many of you will be aware, F.E.A.R (or First Encounter Assault & Recon in short) involves a rather mysterious looking girl in a red dress, a man with an unappetizing taste for human flesh and some rather flashy action set pieces aka The Matrix. All of this is brought together by one of the best game engines around.

F.E.A.R. makes its cinematic pretensions clear from the start. As soon as the credits roll, and the music starts, you are treated to the full works. The camera pans across scores of troops locked 'n' loaded and ready to hunt you down, all seemingly linked to 'Paxton Fettel', a strange kind of guy with extraordinary psychic powers capable of controlling battalions of soldiers and a habit of feeding off any poor unfortunate innocents - presumably to aid his powers of concentration. It doesnt end there, after a short briefing at F.E.A.R. HQ you are sent off to hunt down Fettel equipped with reflexes that are 'off the chart'. These reflexes are put to excellent use, with a slow motion effect like that of Max Payne, or the before mentioned Matrix. But here, it is oooohhhh so much more satisfying thanks to the outstanding environmental effects. Sparks fly everywhere, as chunks of masonry are blasted from the walls and blood splatters from your latest victim. The physics are just great, with boxes sent flying, shelves tipped over, and objects hurtling towards your head. And the explosions, well, the explosions just have to be seen, and what's so great about this is you can witness it in all its glory in slow motion.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• Soft Shadows Disabled

F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate remains an excellent title to check and compare graphics cards with. 4xAA and 16xAF were applied here, and as you can observe, very similar results scaling wise, yet we notice the X2s pull ahead. Very nice.

You'd almost take the framerate numbers for granted, but 300+ FPS in 1600x1200. Bloody hell, that's nearly a little freaky isn't it ?