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 test is pretty texture heavy in the grand scheme of things, so it should prove to be a good measure of the Radeon HD 2900 XT's performance in texture heavy scenarios. These are getting less and less moving forwards, and we know that AMD's developer relations team is pushing procedural texturing quite hard.

Unfortunately for the Radeon HD 2900 XT, performance was well below our expectations, as the Radeon X1950 XTX was faster than it in both single and dual card configurations. There was one scenario where the Radeon HD 2900 XT in a CrossFire configuration was faster than Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB, but in every other situation, it trailed. In some situations, the gap was as large as 25 percent.