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.






Call of Duty 4 shows BFG Tech's GeForce 9600 GT to be a reasonable contender for the Zotac GeForce 9600 GT AMP! Edition, even though it's clocked some 50MHz slower on the core. BFG's card ends up sitting roughly in between the reference GeForce 9600 GT and Zotac's factory overclocked AMP! Edition, just like it did in Crysis. Indeed, the average performance gap between the BFGTech 9600 GT OC and the reference card is just over five percent, while the difference between BFG's card and the higher-clocked Zotac is again just over five percent.

The competition from the similarly priced ATI Radeon HD 3800-series cards is fairly strong with 0xAA, but when anti-aliasing is enabled, the GeForce 9600 GT's opposition really falls away. The gap between the Radeon HD 3870 and BFG Tech's card is less than three percent when AA is disabled, but when 2xAA is enabled, that gap extends to 25 percent. That's not good news for the ATI-based cards.