VGA performance: COD MF2 (DX9) | Anno 1404 (DX10)

Setup your monitor first

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.

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 building and characters.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

Check out especially the most popular resolution -- 1920x1200 -- we are now averaging about at 147 FPS thanks to the overclock. The overclock has a dirct effect in all resolutions.

Anno 1404 - Dawn of Discovery

So ever since the first Anno series was launched many years ago, I have been playing this excellent RTS ever since. Heck, I had a ton of fun with the original game series like Anno 1602 and 1701. If you're unfamiliar with the Anno series of games, they have all been (1404 is the 3rd sequel) colony-builders that take place in vast archipelagos filled with pirates, natives, treasures, and rival colonies. Typically, players start with a single ship packed with essential goods with which they colonize a single island, and then need to expand their realm.

With the same principles and philosophy yet more trading dynamics in-game, this series changed a little. Next to that the graphics engine had an overhaul allowing a DX10 code path, brushing up and speeding up things here and there while pertaining really nice image quality.

For our test with Anno 1404 we enable everything we can enable to the highest possible setting, we render the game in DirectX 10 mode with 4x Anti-Ailiasing enabled. As a result the game is playable up-to 2560x1600 (!) Anno 1404 was one of these titles that benefits massively from the 5970. That performance literally is flabbergasting to see.

We use the new v1.1 patch (which solved a texture bug). But check it out, after the overclock we roughly gain 205 performance in the highest-resolutions (where we are GPU bound).