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 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 multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards.

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








When anti-aliasing is used, the Radeon HD 3870 X2 falls at the hands of Call of Duty 4, where it is simply outclassed by single GPU graphics cards like the GeForce 8800 GTX and GeForce 9800 GTX. And what’s more, the performance advances we’ve seen with the GeForce 9800 GX2 are pretty massive, so you could say it goes a ways to rubbing more salt into the wounds.

That said, there are some relatively significant increases in performance delivered by the Catalyst 8.4 driver. The biggest gains we saw were at 1,920 x 1,200 0xAA 16xAF, 2,560 x 1,600 2xAA 16xAF and 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF, where we found that gameplay smoothness increased. This was especially true at 2,560 x 1,600, where the frame rates were pretty low to start with – at 1,920 x 1,200, the difference wasn’t quite so profound in-game, but the nine percent increase in performance is quite significant in its own right.