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 has traditionally been a game where Nvidia's card have held a clear advantage but that's not the case when you take the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Atomic into account. The huge overclock to the core has led to significant increases to both average and minimum frame rates, allowing the card to match and even overthrow the GeForce GTX 285 and GTX 275 at both 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200, although the Nvidia cards still hold the initiative at 2,560 x 1,600 and offer high minimum frame rates throughout.