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 at War saw the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC record some cracking numbers, and even managed to give the mighty HD 4870 X2 a run for its money. At the lower end of the scale with 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA, the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC managed a minimum frame rate of 62fps: this is a significant 9fps faster than the stock GTX 285 and the experience was much smoother than the HD 4870 X2, which dipped to just 22fps, even though it's average frame rate was slightly higher.

At the other end of the scale, the minimum frame rates were roughly the same for both GTX 285's although at 2,560 x 1,600 4xAA 16xAF the MSI GTX 285 HydroGen OC proved to be faster on average and both graphics cards were more than capable of playing this modern shooter at this dizzying resolution.