BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC AGP

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.01. 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 have created - it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and a subtle HDR lighting effect 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 proprietry 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 five minute portion of the first level in The Battle of El Alamein, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played five minutes of the level. We made use of all four smoke grenades in our armoury at the start of the level and we ran this three times to check that our results were consistent. We found that an average frame rate of around 40 frames per second and a minimum of 20 frames per second was sufficient to experience a smooth gaming experience throughout the title.

Call of Duty 2 is a pretty shader intense title, and the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC showed its prowess against the Radeon X850XT thanks to the increased level of detail and antialiasing we were able to turn on as a result of the extra shader horsepower. We found that we were able to increase the normal map resolution to its maximum value, compared to 'high' on the Radeon X850XT.

We also found that we were able to use a large number of corpses and soft smoke edges on the surrounding world, compared to no soft smoke edges on the Radeon X850XT AGP. There was also the benefit of being able to apply 4x transparency multisampled antialiasing to the scene too. With the Radeon X850XT, we were only able to use 2x antialiasing in order to keep the game play as smooth as possible.

Even with the additional details and increased levels of antialiasing, we were able to experience smoother game play on the BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GS OC. The game also looked a little better too - the smoke is an important part of the game, and soft smoke edges make the smoke feel that little bit more realistic. The soft edges help things to blend in and out of the scene depending on where they are in relation to the smoke grenade.