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.







Call of Duty: World at War doesn't know what to do with the extra 1GB of memory on the Sapphire Vapor-X card either, with it producing identical performance to the 1GB HD 4870 card.

The performance gap between the Vapor-X and the GeForce GTX 275 is much more marked than with Far Cry 2, with the GTX 275 hugely faster at just about every resolution. To pick one randomly, at 1,920 x 1,200 with no AA the GTX 275 was capable of running the game at a minimum of 55fps while the Vapor-X could only manage a minimum of 41fps.

Given the Call of Duty series' tendency to update its graphic engine rather than create a whole new one, it's not preposterous to hypothesis that the GTX 275 will handle Call of Duty 6 better than the Vapor-X will. While there's always the possibility that the revamped engine could favour the current ATI hardware, we wouldn't bet £220 on it.