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 is one of the less demanding games that we test with and one game where the Lightning was happy to nom its way through the frame rates. However despite the fact that the Lightning delivered higher frame rates than all of the ATI cards in the tests, the fact that the GTX 275 and GTX 285 where also faster points more towards the game's preference for Nvidia GPUs rather than any merit of the Lightning specifically.

There's a clear problem with CrossFire in this title, as the minimum frame rate drops to unplayable levels. This really spoils the Radeon HD 4870 X2's showing, as its average frame rates are the highest of all cards. It goes to show that average frame rate isn't everything when you're gaming.