VGA performance: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (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

We'll do three charts per test session / game today. Above, the reference GTS 450 with 1024MB graphics memory so we can see baseline performance for this product scaling from a monitor resolution of 1280x1024 up to 2560x1600.

As you can see, the baseline card can play this game with 4xAA up-to a monitor resolution of 2560x1600 perfectly fine. And that's with every possible in-game quality setting maxed out for the best image quality.

In the second chart we'll compare all the GTS 450 brands tested to date. This launch articles covers no less than ten cards, including the reference product. We included this chart so you could see the competitive performance among the brands and selected models we tested so far.

As you can see, the reference product is where things really begin. Pretty much any GTS 450 SKU out there will have some sort of factory overclock, pushing performance upwards.

And as you are used to, a performance chart that was recently introduced in all our graphics card reviews. Dark orange is the baseline reference card tested today. Then followed in light orange all other GTS 450 cards put to the test today. The charts do become a little difficult to look at with so many entries, but you get the idea.

We do need to mention here that the GTS 450 is aimed at a monitor resolution of up-to roughly 1600x1200, the nature of our tests however is always 1920x1200. Please keep that in mind as we really do aim a little too high for this card series.