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.







There are some issues with CrossFire in World at War, as all of the ATI-based dual GPU solutions we've tested here suffer from very low minimum frame rates. What's more, there's really no competition between the GeForce GTX 285 and the Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4850 X2 - the 285 is faster than the 4870 X2 in all scenarios, including 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF!

BFG's GeForce GTX 285 OCX is around six percent faster than the reference card and is incrementally faster than the Zotac.