NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.2. The game makes use of some awesome effects and is generally very graphically intense and immersive. That's helped by the tremendous smoke effect that Infinity Ward have created - it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and a subtle HDR lighting effect too.

The gameplay is not as linear as the first version of Call of Duty, and Infinity Ward has ditched the rather old Quake 3 engine in favour of creating its own proprietry graphics engine to render the effects. There is something about the game that makes it very intense and you often find yourself having to take a break from the action because you're too overwhelmed by its immersiveness and intensity.

We used a four minute portion of the first level in The Battle of El Alamein, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played four minutes of the level. We ran this three times to check that our results were consistent.

The Optimise for SLI option was enabled on the GeForce 7950 GX2 and BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC SLI; it was disabled on the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX video cards. All other options were set to their maximum values. Finally, we tested the cards at three resolutions with varying anti-aliasing settings to compare the cards in an apples to apples format.

At 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF, the GeForce 7950 GX2 and BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC SLI were reasonably comparable, with the GeForce 7950 GX2 coming out on top by a reasonable margin. The BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GTX OC and Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX were some way behind the two multi-GPU solutions.

The trend continued at 1600x1200 with 2xAA 8xAF - NVIDIA's GeForce 7950 GX2 was over 20% faster than the Sapphire Radeon X1900XTX. All video card configurations tested were playable at these settings.

The GeForce 7950 GX2's performance advantage over its nearest competitors increased at 1920x1200 with 0xAA. The GeForce 7900 GT OC SLI configuration was around four frames per second slower, while both of the single card solutions were over ten frames per second slower, on average. We would recommend lowering the in-game details a little in order to obtain acceptable gameplay in Call of Duty 2 at 1920x1200. On the other hand, GeForce 7950 GX2 has enough performance to apply some Anti Aliasing at this resolution.