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.







We're hoping that one day we'll be able to drop Call of Duty: World at War from our benchmarks suite as it's a rubbish game, but the Top 10 games chart and the traffic stats suggest that it's still hugely popular, and people want to know how well graphics cards can run it. Maybe you've just clicked this page to gauge CoD4 performance though?

Either way, the GTX 275 is comprehensively faster than the Radeon HD 4890 at every resolution and with every combination of AA that we've used. The GTX 285 is a tiny bit quicker than the GTX 275, even if the GTX 275 posted a higher average frame rate at some resolutions. For example, the GTX 285 has a superior minimum of 59fps rather than 55fps at 1,900 x 1,200 with no AA, even though the the GTX 275 has the higher average of 77.9fps rather than 76.3fps. Still, the slight performance advantage of the GTX 285 hardly justifies the extra £80 you'd have to spend to get it.