Building a £400 Gaming PC

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.5 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field. Unlike most triple-A games that were launched late in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only uses a DirectX 9.0 renderer and, given the realistic nature of the graphics, it proves that there's still life left in the old dog!

For our gameplay testing, we did a five-minute manual run through in the second mission of the game - this is pretty representative of the graphics performance you'll see through the rest of the game. We manually adjusted the in-game settings to find the highest-playable settings at both 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050 - the only setting we didn't change was the 'Dual Video Cards' option, which was disabled at all times because we're using just one GPU in our system.

Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.



While Crysis had evidence of some CPU limitations at lower clock speeds, Call of Duty 4 didn't exhibit the same behaviour - the game turned out to be far more GPU limited and we saw performance increases when we overclocked the GPU. That said, at 1,280 x 1,024, we didn't find any real differences in gameplay experience as a direct result of overclocking.

Sure, the frame rates increased a little and the gameplay was smoother, but since we were able to maintain playable frame rates with everything turned on at the system's stock speeds, there wasn't anything left for us to improve upon really speaking.


At 1,680 x 1,050 though, we did see some differences - we found that with both the CPU and GPU overclocked, we could enable 4xAA and maintain smooth frame rates, but the same couldn't be said for the stock-clocked system. We experienced some fairly horrid stuttering with 4xAA enabled at stock settings, but this disappeared when we dropped down to 2xAA.

We overclocked both the CPU and GPU independently as well to further our investigations and we found that we could only enable 4xAA when we increased our GPU clocks.