Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is different to all previous Call of Duty games, as it moves the action out of the World War II era and into the modern day. We have used the full version of the game with the 1.4 patch applied.

The game runs on a proprietary engine, which includes features like true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field. Unlike most triple-A games that were launched late in 2007, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare only uses a DirectX 9.0 renderer and, given the realistic nature of the graphics, it proves that there's still life left in the old dog!

For our gameplay testing, we did a 90 second manual run through in the second mission of the game. 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 Radeon HD 3870 X2 and Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configurations, but was disabled in all single GPU configurations.

Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.






The HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX 512MB suffers from the age old problem in Call of Duty 4 – the card performs respectably without anti-aliasing, but when AA is enabled, performance takes a dive. In fact, it’s to such an extent with this card that it’s a few percent faster than Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT when AA is disabled, but when you flick the switch, a 22 to 23 percent gap opens up between the two cards—and that’s not in favour of the factory-overclocked Radeon HD 3850 from HIS.

What’s telling is the fact that the card is outperformed by Nvidia’s GeForce 8800 GS 384MB in all scenarios tested here. That’s disappointing to say the least but, on the other hand, the card delivers more than adequate frame rates in all test scenarios except 1680x1050 2xAA.