CPU scaling in games with dual & quad core processors - 3 - CPU performance - Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4

Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.

For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti Aliasing
• 16x anisotropic filtering
• All settings maxed out

So from to to bottom we made sure we got the basis covered. I really wanted to insert a low-budget dual-core processor in the charts just for the simple fact you can observe the scaling of the faster processors. The slowest Dual-core processor used is the AMD Athlon X2 4850E. You can pick it up at roughly 60 USD and probably is the most green CPU in this test, for that fact alone I love it.

On the other side of the spectrum we see the 1400 USD Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9770. Anything in-between these two processors is the baseline we need to form an opinion about.

Now above in 1024x768 you'll notice the effect of the processor, after 1600x1200 the graphics card becomes more of a bottleneck.

Above 1280x1024: The reality with Call of Duty 4 is simple ... it just doesn't care much about the processor used. And that accounts for any resolution.

Say you game at 1600x1200'ish. With Call of Duty 4 it just doesn't matter if you own a Dual, Quad 60USD or 1400 USD processor.

The higher we go in resolution, the closer the scores get, here we see the GPU (GeForce 8800 Ultra) become the limiting factor.

We end our tests at the biggest culprit of any graphics card, over 4M pixels rendered at 2560x1600.