PowerColor Radeon X1950 Pro SCS3

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.2. The game makes use of some awesome effects and is generally very graphically intense and immersive. That's helped by the tremendous smoke effect that Infinity Ward have created -- it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and subtle HDR lighting effects too.

The gameplay is not as linear as the first version of Call of Duty, and Infinity Ward has ditched the rather old Quake 3 engine in favour of creating its own proprietary graphics engine to render the effects. There is something about the game that makes it very intense and you often find yourself having to take a break from the action because you're too overwhelmed by its immersiveness and intensity.

We used a custom timedemo that covers both indoor and outdoor performance in the title across one of the most intensive portions of the game. The Optimise for SLI option was disabled for single GPU configurations as it causes some texture corruption if there is only one GPU present. It was enabled for dual-GPU configurations and all other options were set to their maximum values.







Call Of Duty 2 is one of the Radeon X1950 Pro's Achilles heals, as performance really suffers with anti-aliasing enabled -- even at resolutions as low as 1280x1024 with the maximum in-game details set. Even when anti-aliasing is disabled, performance is far from stellar too, so the only way to really improve things is to lower things like the texture quality to boost the frame rate. Unlike Half-Life 2: Episode One, Call Of Duty 2 doesn't really need much more than a 40 fps average frame rate in order to maintain smooth gameplay, so you're not going to have to reduce the in-game quality settings too much.

By comparison, even a stock-clocked Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS comprehensively beats the Radeon X1950 Pro into the ground when anti-aliasing is enabled, nevermind Inno3D's heavily overclocked GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL! Without anti-aliasing, the X1950 Pro manages to claw a slight lead over a reference clocked 7900 GS, but not one that is going to make a massive difference while playing the game.