Call of Duty 2

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.2. The game makes use of some awesome effects and is generally very graphically intense and immersive. That's helped by the tremendous smoke effect that Infinity Ward has created -- it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and subtle HDR lighting effects too.

The gameplay is not as linear as the first version of Call of Duty, and Infinity Ward has ditched the rather old Quake 3 engine in favour of creating its own proprietary graphics engine to render the effects. There is something about the game that makes it very intense and you often find yourself having to take a break from the action because you're too overwhelmed by its immersiveness and intensity.

We used a custom timedemo that covers both indoor and outdoor performance in the title across one of the most intensive portions of the game. The Optimise for SLI option was disabled for single GPU configurations as it causes some texture corruption if there is only one GPU present. It was enabled for dual-GPU configurations and all other options were set to medium-high settings - we've included screenshots below.







The XFX 8600 GT XXX's performance in Call of Duty 2 is respectable, but not as promising as what we've seen in some of the more recent titles. We found that the card was slightly slower than the GeForce 7900 GS on average, but considerably slower than the Radeon X1950 Pro. The additional clockspeed also enables this card to consistently outperform AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT in both GDDR3 and GDDR4 flavours too - that's something that can't be said about the stock-clocked GeForce 8600 GT.