VGA performance: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (DX9)

Monitor Setup

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.

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

As you can see, SLI scaling for the GTX 560 Ti at reference clocks, is absolutely impressive.

And as you are used to, a performance chart that was recently introduced in all our graphics card reviews. Dark Orange is the card tested today, in this chart we show you GTX 560 Ti SLI against single graphics cards performance, so that you can spot the performance level compared to say one GTX 580.

In addition to that, we also place the GTX 560 Ti in a chart along with other cards tested in multi-GPU mode.

Now a few comments here, this chart will not be 100% precise as some of the older cards have been tested with a few month older driver. That can have an effect here and there, but due to our test methods... not a lot.

Secondly, we still need to do a lot of work on the the Radeon HD 6900 series in Multi-GPU mode, pretty much all tests will include 6950 in CFX enabled, the 6970 cards still need to be tested in CFX.