Connect3D & Sapphire Radeon X1900GT

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 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 four minute portion of the first part of The Battle of El Alamein level, 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 four minutes of the level. We ran this three times to check that our results were consistent.

The Optimise for SLI option was enabled, as it provides a frame rate boost for all video cards - all other options were set to their maximum values. Finally, we tested the cards at three resolutions with varying anti-aliasing settings to compare the cards in an apples to apples format.

The two Radeon X1900GT's were faster than the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC at 1280x1024 4xAA 8xAF, but they were not fast enough to beat off the XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition that delivered a higher average and minimum frame rate. The BFG Tech GeForce 7800 GT OC was quite a bit slower than the competition - the maximum details and high levels of AA seemed to kill this card at the modest 1280x1024 resolution.

At 1600x1200 2xAA 16xAF, the BFG Tech GeForce 7900 GT OC managed to deliver a subtly higher average frame rate than the two Radeon X1900GT's. However, we'd call this one a draw - the three cards are all reasonably playable but you could possibly experience some occasional hitching. The BFG Tech 7800 GT OC was some 25% slower than the other cards tested.

The XFX GeForce 7900 GT XXX Edition was the fastest card by some distance at 1920x1200 0xAA 8xAF. The BFG Tech 7900 GT OC delivered a slightly higher average frame rate than the two Radeon X1900GT's - a mere one and a half frames per second - but the minimum frame rate remained the same. We couldn't tell the difference in gameplay experience between these three cards, but we would recommend lowering some of the texture details in order to attain smooth gameplay at this resolution.