VGA performance: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (DX9)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 is set five years on from COD4 and brings a new villain into town: Vladimir Makarov. All the trouble start when Makarov frames the US for a terrorist attack on a Russian airport (yes, the infamous airport level). The rest of the story follows the same intertwined British and US mission format as before, and the missions are all incredible set-pieces that involve storming oil rigs, climbing icy cliffs and, of course, an adrenaline packed snowmobile chase. Visually the 3D engine seems to be the same as the COD4 one, it's tweaked and nearly abused to push out the very best of it's capability. The result is a very decent looking game really, smoke, fog, sun, vegetation detailed texturing of objects, buildings and characters. 

Our image quality settings selected are the most complex you can set in-game. 4x AA, maxed out anisotropic filtering, the best textures, everything is enabled to it's maximum capability. Any decent graphics card can run the game, it's that simple. There's no need to give in to lower quality settings.

Image Quality setting:

• Level Contingency
• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

We'll do three charts per test session / game today. Above, the reference GTX 460 with 768MB graphics memory, then the reference 1024MB card and then ECS GeForce GTS 460 Black series (1024MB model).

As you can see, all cards can play this game with 4xAA up-to a monitor resolution of 2560x1600 perfectly fine. And that's with every possible in-game quality setting maxed out for the best image quality.

In the second chart we'll compare all the GTX 460 brands tested thus far. Some are 768MB configurations, others are 1024MB models. We included this chart so you could see the competitive performance among the brands and selected models we tested so far.

And as you are used to, a performance chart that was recently introduced in all our graphics card reviews. Dark orange is the card tested today.

Look closely as we also added ALL other GTX 460 cards tested to date, including competing and reference products 768MB/1024MB. The charts do become a little difficult to look at with so many entries, but you get the idea.