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 1.1 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.








The World at War performance charts are dominated by Nvidia's hardware and the GeForce GTX 260+ is significantly faster than the Radeon HD 4870 1GB at all resolutions and settings. With SLI and CrossFire, that gap just increases with resolution – at 2,560 x 1,600, the GeForce GTX 260+ will deliver approximately 40 percent more performance.

What's more, both the Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire and Radeon HD 4870 X2 configurations suffer from really poor minimum frame rates at all settings we've tested. The problem isn't there with either the Radeon HD 4870 1GB or 512MB models, so it looks like an issue with scalability in the driver.