Call of Duty: World at War

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty: World at War is Treyarch’s controversial World War II shooter set on the Pacific and Eastern fronts, where you switch roles between an American Marine and a Russian soldier who survives Stalingrad and follows the push into Berlin at the end of the war.

World at War uses a beefed up version of the proprietary engine used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was developed by Infinity Ward and has easily been the most successful game in the series. It uses the DirectX 9.0 renderer exclusively and features true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field amongst other things.

We used the full retail version of the game downloaded from Steam, which was patched to version 1.3.1080 and for our gameplay testing, we did a 90-second manual run through from the second mission in the game where you are part of a beach landing in the Pacific. It appears to be one of the more intensive parts of the game with lots of explosions, water, smoke and lighting effects thrown in for good measure.

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 multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards. Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.







Nvidia tends to have the edge over AMD when it comes to Activision's Call of Duty's engine, due to return with the much anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 this winter and that certainly seems to be the case with the GTX 295, which holds a sizeable lead at every resolution over the HD 4870 X2, especially when it comes to minimum frame rates. However, it's interesting to note that at resolutions higher than 1,920x1,200 the GTX 295's struggle to maintain thier chart topping performance, especial in regards to minimum frame rates, which slip below those of much cheaper cards. Once again, the two GTX 295s perform almost identically - it's clear there's no performance advantage to be had with the new board design.