11 - Game Performance: Call of Duty 4 | Crysis Warhead

Gaming: 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.

Call of Duty 4 -- 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

It is nearly silly how well COD4 scales. Again the same thesis applies between the 4870 (512MB) and  4870 X2 (2x 1024MB per GPU) as the result in more than double the performance among the two.

Crysis WARHEAD

As in last year's game, expect to encounter dense jungle environments, barren ice fields, Korean soldiers and plenty of flying aliens. There's no denying that this is more of the same, except here it's a more tightly woven experience with a little less freedom to explore.

With a top-end PC (although Warhead has supposedly benefited from an improved game engine you'll still need a fairly beefy system). But rest assured, developer Crytek has enhanced more than just the graphics engine.

Vehicles are more fun to drive, firefights are more intense and focused, and aliens do more than just float around you. More emphasis on the open-ended environments would have been welcome, but a more exciting (though shorter) campaign, a new multiplayer mode, and a whole bunch of new maps make Crysis Warhead an excellent expansion to one of last year's best shooters.

Crysis Warhead has good looks. As mentioned before, the game looks better than Crysis, and it runs better too. Our test machine that struggled a bit to run the original at high settings ran Warhead smoothly with the same settings. Yet as much as you may have heard about Crysis' technical prowess, you'll still be impressed when you feast your eyes on the swaying vegetation, surging water, and expressive animations. Outstanding graphics. Couldn't say more here.

Crysis Warhead is new in our benchmark suite -- Our image quality settings. We opt the gamers mode. However, we select DirectX 10 mode as well to allow way more heft shader code which will take a hefty toll on the GPU, yet also frame buffer utilization.

• Level Ambush
• Codepath DX10
• Anti aliasing 2xMSAA
• Ingame Quality mode Gamer

This setting equals "High" quality mode in the old Crysis. We could opt for enthusiast mode, but really .. that mode is not yet ready for today's graphics cards as for example 1920x1200 would use something near 1200 to 1300MB MB of video memory. Since anno 2008 not one card has that kind of memory or power, the gamers mode is a more comparable setting. Now if you say, but dude ... the X2 has 2048MB of memory ? Correct, yet the memory is cloned per GPU. Meaning that each GPU has a partition of 1024MB assigned and both the 1024MB partition carry the same set of textures, shaders etc etc

We up the ante a little more though, and apply 2 levels of anti-aliasing. Though we really wanted to push 4x AA here, we notice that current day graphics cards yet again run out of frame buffer and you'll notice the HDD activity going up a a lot. That would effect the frame rate dramatically disallowing an objective measurement of our time demo. So 2xAA in combo with the gamers quality mode is what we test with.

Note -- I have not had the time yet to test NVIDIA cards as we need to replicate the installation on the NVIDIA test system, that's the reason why it's  (not yet) included in our tests.