GeForce 7900 GS Group Test

Apples to Apples - 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 have created - it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and a subtle HDR lighting effect 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 proprietry 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 four minute portion of the first part of The Battle of El Alamein level, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played four minutes of the level. The Optimise for SLI option was disabled, as it provides a frame rate boost for all video cards - all other options were set to their maximum values.

The additional memory bandwidth available on Galaxy's GeForce 7900 GS was beneficial here, even with no anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. Sapphire's Radeon X1900GT had a strong showing, too.

We're not quite sure what happened here with ATI's cards, as anti-aliasing really hurt the performance that the cards delivered. Meanwhile, the spread remained the same across the six GeForce 7900 GS cards. The game was just about playable on the BFG Tech, EVGA and Galaxy GeForce 7900 GS cards at these settings, but everything else - with the exception of the Radeon X1800GTO - would have been better suited to 2xAA.