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.








While at 1,680 x 1,050 we see that the Nvidia SLI setups and the GTX 295 all reach Call of Duty: World at War's 90 frame per second cap as their average result, what's surprising here is the relatively disappointing performance of the 4870 X2 in both single and dual card configurations. The GTX 295 is streets ahead performance wise, with frame rate advantages of over fifteen frames per second in a number of tests.

Looking to SLI and CrossFire, the advantages of SLI GeForce GTX 295s are somewhat negated by the game's 90 frame per second cap, with the two Nvidia dual GPU card averaging 90 fps in every test, right up to 2,560 x 1,600 with 4xAA. Meanwhile, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 in CrossFire appears to scale better, it's still significantly outperformed by the GeForce GTX 295, and is never able to achieve the average of 90 fps indicating fully maxed out performance.