Radeon X1900-series roundup

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.01. 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 a subtle HDR lighting effect 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 proprietry 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 five minute portion of the first level in The Battle of El Alamein, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played five minutes of the level. We made use of all four smoke grenades in our armoury at the start of the level and we ran this three times to check that our results were consistent. We found that an average frame rate of around 40 frames per second and a minimum of 20 frames per second was sufficient to experience a smooth gaming experience throughout the title.

Call of Duty 2 proved to be quite a close contest between the Radeon X1900XTX and Radeon X1900XT cards, with the Radeon X1900XT only requiring the texture details to be dropped from 'Extra' to 'High' and the number of corposes reduced from 'Insane' to 'Large' in order to deliver a smooth gaming experience.

The GeForce 7800 GTX 512 delivered a similar gaming experience but was lacking the high quality anisotropic filtering option that is almost given on ATI's new high-end cards. High quality anisotropic filtering can really make some quite amazing differences to the textures on the ground, as it is almost angle independant.

There are often times where the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 can suffer from what is known as 'texture shimmering'. The problem isn't apparent in Call of Duty 2, but the detail in the distance looks appreciably better on the Radeon X1900-series cards when high quality anisotropic filtering is enabled.

The All-In-Wonder X1900 had to take a resolution reduction in order to become playable. However, the positive was that we were able to enable quality adaptive antialiasing at 1280x1024, providing a decent experience at a slightly lower resolution. All in all, it performed pretty well and the gaming experience was good but you could tell that there was a difference in resolution, with the higher resolution making the gaming experience that little bit more immersive.