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 was barely any difference performance wise between the ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB and the HD 4770s on test with the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB recording frame rates within two or three fps in most cases. The Nvidia GeForce GTS 250 512MB was noticeably faster than any of ATI's faster offerings here although at 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA 16xAF things are fairly equal between it and the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB which was able to provide playable frame rates up to 1,920 x 1,200 16xAF with no AA although with AA enabled the frame rate was a debatable 23fps which might be acceptable for some of you.

At 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA 16xAF, the XFX ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB performed admirably with a minimum frame rate of 27fps so Call of Duty: World at War fans with 20in monitors need look no further for a sub £100 graphics card.