Call of Duty: World at War

Publisher: Activision

Call of Duty: World at War is Treyarch’s controversial World War II shooter set on the Pacific and Eastern fronts, where you switch roles between an American Marine and a Russian soldier who survives Stalingrad and follows the push into Berlin at the end of the war.

World at War uses a beefed up version of the proprietary engine used in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, which was developed by Infinity Ward and has easily been the most successful game in the series. It uses the DirectX 9.0 renderer exclusively and features true world dynamic lighting, HDR lighting, dynamic shadowing and depth of field amongst other things.

We used the full retail version of the game downloaded from Steam, which was patched to version 1.3.1080 and for our gameplay testing, we did a 90-second manual run through from the second mission in the game where you are part of a beach landing in the Pacific. It appears to be one of the more intensive parts of the game with lots of explosions, water, smoke and lighting effects thrown in for good measure.

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 multi-GPU configurations, but was disabled for all single GPU cards. Finally, anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering were controlled from inside the game.







Call of Duty: World at War was a little more clear cut than our other benchmarks, responding well to increases in clock speed. As such the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic was ahead at all resolutions. The GTX 275 is clearly better value here managing noticeably better frame rates across the board. The Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 Vapor-X 2GB doesn't do a very good job of justifying its price over the stock card here though especially at lower settings and it's only at 1,920 x 1,200 4xAA and above that it starts to pull away significantly.