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 their maximum values.






Call of Duty 2 seems to really benefit from a higher shader clock, as performance on Zotac's GeForce 8800 GTX AMP! Edition isn't quite as near to the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO Superclocked as it has been in some of the other titles we've tested. It tended to split the overclocked EVGA and standard clocked reference cards down the middle, instead of being right on the heels of EVGA's card. That said, at 2560x1600 4xAA, the gap was as low as 1.4 frames per second, so even then you're not going to see much difference in the real world.