18 - Gaming: Call of Duty 4

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.

We kick-off with Call of Duty 4; before we dive into the benchmarks a little explanation. Each game we test will show in the first chart direct baseline performance based on an identical processor, and then overclocked results.

So above you can see a GeForce 9800 GX2 on our 680i based test setup. Which comes with 1142 MHz DDR2 memory and a X6800 processor.

Then look at the 790i, it's again two core X6800 performance yet now the system has DDR3 memory, and the mainboard itself obviously has the new Direct GPU-to-GPU communication (PWShort) & Broadcast support. All three factors will make a difference in the lower resolutions in combo with multi-GPU setups, no doubt about it.

Now believe it or now, but COD4 was showing only a little performance difference. You'll be amazed what you see once we hit the somewhat older and CPU bound games.

At 10x7 we see a 10 FPS difference, by merely changing a mainboard.  But let's overclock a little and look at FPS behavior and CPU scaling.

For this benchmark we use ACT II - All Ghillied up.

Again some explanation. The first to results to the right are the two baseline results based on dual-core X6800 performance. Then in all other results we flip two additional CPU cores on and start to overclock to 1333 MHz FSB / 3 GHz quad-core, QX9770 emulation at 3.2 GHZ - 1600 Mhz FSB. And last but not elast as promised the benchmark results with the Q6600 (2400 MHz processor) at 3600 MHz / 1600 MHz FSB / 1600 MHz DDR3.

Now COD4 is a little GPU stringent, but in the other titles you'll see a heap of scaling going on, very exciting actually.

Image Quality setting:

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

In the higher resolutions you'll stumble into the GPU bottleneck. Basically the GPUs can't render any faster. With this a faster infrastructure surrounding the graphics card, will not matter. Therefore look at the differences in the lower resolutions.