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 1.4 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'. The 'Dual Video Cards' option was enabled for the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations, but was disabled in all single GPU configurations.

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






While Crysis gave the Radeon HD 3870 X2 a pretty promising start, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare brought it back down to earth with what ended up being relatively average performance. At 1680x1050 4xAA 16xAF, the 3870 X2 ended up being a hair slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX, the Ultra and also BFGTech’s GeForce 8800 GTS 512 OC.

When the resolution increased to 1920x1200 with 4xAA still applied, the 8800 GTS 512 fell back a little, but both the Ultra and GTX remained dominant. Obviously though, ATI’s anti-aliasing performance is sub-standard in this generation, so it only tells half of the story – when anti-aliasing is disabled, things look a little better in some respects, because the 3870 X2 now manages to outperform the 8800 GTX.

Sadly though, the 3870 X2 doesn’t manage to keep up with the 8800 GTS 512, as the latter has been let loose from its bandwidth limited shackles. With the shackles removed, the 8800 GTS 512 manages to outperform the 3870 X2 convincingly at 2560x1600 and by a whisker at 1920x1200.