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.








There's no contest for the performance crown in Call of Duty: World at War, with the GeForce GTX 295 able to fully tap into it's performance and deliver fantastic performance at both 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 with or without anti-aliasing.

In comparison the Radeon HD 4870 X2 really struggles, especially when it comes to minimum frame rates. Where the GeForce GTX 295's driver lets it down in Fallout 3, the same is the case in World at War for the Radeon HD 4870 X2, with unplayable low minimum frame rates regardless of resolution. Single GPU ATI cards do not suffer from this same issue in this benchmark, so it's clearly a driver error on ATI's part that's caused this disappointing performance.

The GeForce GTX 295 isn't free of driver issues in World at War either though, and at 2,560 x 1,600 it's minimum frame rate performance drops away leaving it a little behind the GTX 285's fster single GPU. While the 295 still produces superior average frame rates, the focus here is on minimum fps as it has the biggest direct impact on a smooth gameplay experience and at the 2,560 it's clear that the GTX 285 is winner.

However, as the GTX 295 possesses such a demanding lead at the more common resolutions of 1,680 x 1,050 and 1,920 x 1,200 it takes this round: 3-2 to Nvidia.