Call of Duty: World at War

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty: World at War is Treyarch’s controversial World War II shooter set on the Pacific and Eastern fronts, where you switch roles between an American Marine and a Russian soldier who survives Stalingrad and follows the push into Berlin at the end of the war.

World at War uses a beefed up version of the proprietary engine used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was developed by Infinity Ward and has easily been the most successful game in the series. It uses the DirectX 9.0 renderer exclusively and features true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field amongst other things.

We used the full retail version of the game downloaded from Steam, which was patched to version 1.1 and for our gameplay testing, we did a 90-second manual run through from the second mission in the game where you are part of a beach landing in the Pacific. It appears to be one of the more intensive parts of the game with lots of explosions, water, smoke and lighting effects thrown in for good measure.

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.







ATI clearly has as much respect for Call of Duty: World at War as we do – its dual-GPU cards and CrossFire setups are woeful when it comes to running it. The slideshow-esque minimum of 9fps at 2,560 x 1,600 with 4xAA and 16xAF pale in comparison to the 34fps minimum of the BFG GTX 285 H20.

Then again, Nvidia’s dual-GPU setups don’t far much better than ATI’s in World at War with even its flagship GeForce GTX 295 scoring a choppy 24fps minimum at this resolution. This makes the BFG GTX 285 H20 one of the fastest cards at running World at War. Unfortunately, the quality of the game doesn’t make that claim quite as impressive as it sounds.