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.






Call of Duty: World of War doesn't seem to take advantage of the extra 512MB of memory available as well as other titles, and the difference between a 512MB and the 1GB Gigabyte GeForce GTS 250 is much smaller, although still apparent. Both average and minimum frame rates are very marginally higher, although you'd struggle to notice any sort of real difference while playing.

In comparison the similarly priced Radeon HD 4870 1GB delivers both superior average and minimum frame rates regardless of resolution or AA setting, offering smooth gameplay at up to 1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA - not bad for £110!