Call of Duty 2

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, as were both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.




We didn't see any differences in performance between the E6750 and E6700 here at either 1024x768 or 1600x1200. At 1600x1200, you're not going to notice the difference in performance between any of the four processors tested here since the difference between the fastest and slowest processors is less than one frame per second.

Quake 4

We used the full retail version of Quake 4 patched to version 1.3.0. It's the fourth game in the Quake series, based on the technically sound Doom 3 engine. We used a custom-recorded demo from a section that represents fairly typical performance throughout the rest of the game. Quake 4 features support for Symmetric Multiprocessing, which we turned on. In addition, we set the in-game details to high quality, and turned off Vsync, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering.



In Quake 4, there were some quite large differences in terms of frame rate, but given that we're well over 100 fps (even at 1600x1200), you're not going to see a great deal of difference in the real world. It's nice to see a five frame per second increase in performance that's simply a result of a faster bus speed, though.