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 -- it's better than anything we've ever seen before. 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 disabled for single GPU configurations as it causes some texture corruption if there is only one GPU present. It was enabled for dual-GPU configurations and all other options were set to their maximum values.








Again, the performance picture that other games have painted is very similar to the one painted in Call of Duty 2. The GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI configuration is appreciably faster than the lone EVGA Superclocked 8800 Ultra, but because of texture hardware limitations, the pair of CrossFired ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT cards were slower when 4xAA was applied at 2560x1600.

At either 1600x1200 or 1920x1200, both the SLIed 8800 GTS 640MB cards and the HD 2900 XT CrossFire configuration were faster than the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked. However, considering that you’re already well above 60 frames per second on all of these configurations, you’re not going to see much of a difference in performance at the lower resolutions. Hell, you can even get away with a relatively affordable GeForce 8800 GTX running at the standard frequencies and still maintain 60 fps in this title.

Of course, as newer content comes out, you’re likely to see EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked card show off its girth a bit more when every frame counts.