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.






What we see in Modern Warfare is a card that outperforms the GeForce 8800 Ultra when anti-aliasing is disabled and, when it's enabled, the card is quite a bit slower than the 8800 GTX. At 1920x1200 with 4xAA enabled, the BFG Tech 8800 GTS OC 512MB is outperformed by the newly released Radeon HD 3870 X2 but is faster at every other setting tested. However, given that there are some early driver issues with that card, we expect this to change as new drivers are released.