Call of Duty: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Released way back in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is not a new game but we felt the need to include it as many people still enjoy the multiplayer and to show how far essentially the same game engine has come. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.6 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 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game. All of the in-game settings were set to their maximum values, including texture details which were configured to 'Extra' and anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.

CPU usage in-game

It's difficult to decipher how threaded Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare really is beyond two threads. It only requires the pair to achieve its maximum FPS, but after that the load on the CPU cores isn't consistently high like we've seen in other games, and there's three cores (blue, dark blue and red) all intermingled around 40-50 per cent load, with pink and green around 20 percent and then yellow mostly sub 10 per cent.

It could be a surprisingly high degree of threading from the old Modern Warfare engine, or simply the game not issuing commands heavy enough or each execution isn't related for the OS to lock it to specific CPU cores.

This is unlike Modern Warfare 2 then, which relied heavily on two-three threads loading the CPU cores consistently.