Memory: Is more always better?

Call of Duty 2:

Publisher: Activision

We used the full version of Call of Duty 2, patched to version 1.01. 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 have created - it's better than anything we've ever seen before. There are also real time shadows and a subtle HDR lighting effect 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 proprietry 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 five minute portion of the first level in The Battle of El Alamein, starting the clock from the beginning of the battle, completing the missions in the same order, stopping the frame rate recording when we had played five minutes of the level. We made use of all four smoke grenades in our armoury at the start of the level and we ran this three times to check that our results were consistent. We found that an average frame rate of around 40 frames per second and a minimum of 20 frames per second was sufficient to experience a smooth gaming experience throughout the title.

All four configurations were playable at 1280x1024 2xAA 8xAF with very high details and high texture details, with the only differences being the transparency antialiasing detail. This time around, the four 512MB module configuration was the config that suffered from relatively poor performance (due to the timings), resulting in us having to lower the antialiasing details a little.

Again, we saw a subtle performance improvement as a result of increasing the memory bus speed to 260MHz (520MHz DDR), with the minimum frame rate improving by 1 fps, while the average was half a frame per second higher than with the memory bus runnig at 200MHz (400MHz DDR) over the course of three run throughs.

Interestingly, Call of Duty 2 doesn't suffer a performance hit as a result of only using 1GB of memory. The minimum frame rate was exactly the same as the minimum we recorded for the 2x1GB modules at 400MHz, while the average frame rate was virtually the same.