Call of Duty 2

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 has 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, as were both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.



Call of Duty 2 followed a similar trend, in that there were small benefits for quad-core processors over their dual-core counterparts, but the differences in frame rates are so small that any advantages are going to go pretty much unnoticed.

Quake 4

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. It's the fourth game in the Quake series, based on the technically sound Doom 3 engine. We used a custom-recorded demo from a section that represents fairly typical performance throughout the rest of the game. Quake 4 features support for Symmetric Multiprocessing, which we turned on. In addition, we set the in-game details to high quality, and turned off Vsync, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.



In Quake 4 we saw more scaling, but then in this case we're more CPU limited than we have been in any other title - the frame rates are considerably higher.