Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra

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 has created -- it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and subtle HDR lighting effects 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 proprietary 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 custom timedemo that covers both indoor and outdoor performance in the title across one of the most intensive portions of the game. The Optimise for SLI option was disabled for single GPU configurations as it causes some texture corruption if there is only one GPU present. It was enabled for dual-GPU configurations and all other options were set to their maximum values.


Our Call of Duty 2 timedemo is quite texture and bandwidth heavy, but both the GeForce 8800 Ultra and GeForce 8800 GTX eat it for breakfast at 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. We’re definitely not shader limited at those resolutions though, as the Ultra’s average performance advantage over the GTX is only five and a half percent. However, at 2560x1600, you start to see some benefits to the Ultra, as the dependence on memory bandwidth starts to kick in – the Ultra’s lead is stretched to nine and 10 percent at 2xAA and 4xAA respectively.