Call of Duty 2

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.2. 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 has created. There are also real time shadows and subtle HDR lighting effects 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 proprietary 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 custom timedemo that covers both indoor and outdoor performance in the title across one of the most intensive portions of the game. The Optimise for SLI option was enabled for dual-GPU configurations and all other options were set to high settings.





Strangely enough, the dual x8 Asus Blitz Extreme, uh.. blitzes the competition in high resolution scenarios in Call of Duty 2. This is despite the Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP @n having a wider dual x16 bandwidth and being a slightly better performer in general. However, even at 48fps the P35 board which runs CrossFire in a x16/x4 configuration is still very playable even at 2560x1600, and the X38 dual x16 is only a frame per second faster than this.

At lower resolutions like 1280x1024, there's nothing between the dual x8 and dual x16 boards, although they are both a significant 30fps faster than the P35 x16/x4 configuration.