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 1.1 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.








World at War is dominated by Nvidia and the GeForce GTX 260-216 offers the best gameplay experience by a considerable margin at this price point - the increased clock frequencies on the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo make a bit of a difference, but it's not really significant at any point. It's certainly not the difference between playable and unplayable frame rates - both the stock and HIS 4870 1GB cards top out at 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA 16xAF and at this setting the GeForce GTX 260-216 is around 16 percent faster than the overclocked IceQ4+ card.