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

What are you looking at?  Above is a chart with generic baseline performance. We inserted the R6850, 6870 and as reference a R5870.

• The projected performance for the R6850 is to be above an R5830 and GeForce GTX 460 768MB
• The projected performance for the R6870 is to be above an R5850 and GeForce GTX 460 1024MB

On average, and that matches in our benchmarks, the 6870 will be close to, equal or slower than a single R5870.

As you can see, all cards 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.

Anything after 60 FPS by the way is overkill as your monitor very likely can't refresh faster anyways. However we measure GPU performance here and not the limitations of your monitor. And 120Hz CRT/LCD monitors are an exception of course.

And as you are used to, a performance chart that was recently introduced in all our graphics card reviews. Dark orange is the cards tested today. In Green we added the competitors reference cards performance which is what AMD is after in terms of beating the competition.

MIND YOU - GeForce GTX 460 has a lot of factory overclocked models in the market, delivering 10 to 15% more performance on average, that does make a difference. Pricing of course will be the decisive factor here. But for the first test round, that's certainly impressive.