Hydra performance - Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

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 all starts 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 it's 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 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

So COD MW2 definitely shows less scaling than the other titles we tested thus far. Still, the combo of the 5870 and GTX 285 shows an increase in performance.

We see similar behavior on the 4850 plus 4890 combo.

Surprisingly enough the 4770 with 9800 GTX+ goes into the stratosphere. Consistently these two card have proven to be a very powerful combo.

And yes, the budget 4770 with the classy 5870 gives piss poor performance again.