2 - A little 101 ...
A little 101 on what we are doing.
Next to Far Cry 2, World at War is one of the most anticipated gaming titles of this season voted by you guys. Therefore we wanted to show you how the game is running on modern age graphics cards. This way you can look at the performance versus resolution and make any decisions based on that information. Doubtful however is that you need to upgrade your graphics card since the game engine is based on the COD4 model.
Now we have chosen the most badass on the GPU level which boils down to the Blood and Iron Tank level. It's a really funny level where you get to drive around in a tank armed with heavy ammunition and a flame thrower.
Besides that it is a pleasurable level to play, there's a lot going on. When the level loads up you immediately notice dense vegetation, decent amount of complex shaders, volumetric smoke, heaps of objects. All in all one of the most heavy on the GPU levels. In fact the rest of the levels would get you 20-25% more performance on average, this one is just more complex to render.
Our image quality settings are the most complex you can set in-game. 4xAA, heavy anisotropic filtering, the best textures, every thing is enabled as any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give into lower quality settings.
Here's an overview of the cards that we used to test the game with:
| Radeon 4870 X2 2048MB |
| Radeon 4870 1024MB |
| Radeon 4870 512MB + CrossfireX |
| Radeon 4850 512MB |
| Radeon 4830 512MB |
| Radeon 3870 X2 1024MB |
| Radeon 3870 512MB |
| GeForce GTX 280 1024MB + SLI |
| GeForce GTX 260 896MB 216SP + SLI |
| GeForce 9800 GX2 1024MB |
| GeForce 9800 GTX+ 512MB |
| GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB |
| GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB |
| GeForce 9800 GT 512MB |
| GeForce 8800 GT 512MB |
| GeForce 9600 GT 512MB |
So we picked no less than nineteen graphics card configurations ranging from last years mid-range to the current high-end graphics cards. For this test we opted mid-range ro high-end graphics cards.
The good news is that Call of Duty World of War uses the exact same 3D engine as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It does has some new graphics tweaks, but more importantly the current driver this already support the game, which is great news for CrossfireX and SLI users.
Because COD World at War it targeted as a very broad audience, they made sure it's playable on pretty much any modern graphics card. Do not be afraid to select anything and everything you can. Here's our selected graphics settings. mind you that for Radeon 3870/4870 X2 and GeForce 9800 GX2 we have set the Dual Videocards selection to YES as well.
