Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.5 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field. Unlike most triple-A games that were launched late in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only uses a DirectX 9.0 renderer and, given the realistic nature of the graphics, it proves that there's still life left in the old dog!

For our gameplay testing, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game. 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.







Things get a little more interesting in Call of Duty 4, as we start to see some more differences in anti-aliasing performance—but only when 4xAA is applied. With 0xAA and 2xAA applied, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB SLI configuration is as fast, if not slightly faster than the GeForce 9800 GX2.

However, once 4xAA is turned on, the GeForce 9800 GX2 pulls a hefty lead out of the hat – we're talking more than 25 percent, so it's a significant performance advancement. Having spoken to Nvidia about this for a while, there's no real explanation other than a potential bug in the Forceware 169.44 driver that results in lower than expected performance with 4xAA enabled – I guess we'll find out if this is the case when Nvidia officially releases 173-series drivers for the GeForce 8 cards.