7 - Game Performance: Call of Duty 4 & Crysis
Gaming: Call of Duty 4
Activision recently released Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the next installment in the popular war game series. Moving away from the World War II setting, Modern Warfare instead centers around a conflict involving Russia and the Middle East. And hey, you even get to die ... and then continue the game in the past.
We kick-off with Call of Duty 4; before we dive into the benchmarks a little explanation.
Let's have a look and suit up in our best cloaking gear for COD4. For this benchmark we use disguise ourselves in the Ghillie suit, load up ACT II - All Ghillied up. Not just for the great gameplay, but also the intense and dense graphics utilized are breathtaking. Massive high-quality texturing, shaders and a serious amount of shadows, fog and debris are applied in this level to mask and hide as best as you can.
You'll notice that throughout the review that the 9800 GTX does seem to like SLI. Not in all games though, yet it works pretty well. A single GTX at 1920x1200 gives an FPS of 45, in SLI that is 86.
Image Quality setting:
- 4x Anti Aliasing
- 16x anisotropic filtering
- All settings maxed out
The level where we measure and the image quality settings used
Gaming: Crysis - Single Player v1.2
With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War except on more of a geographic scale.
Oh yeah, you probably want to hear about how it performs, right?
Image Quality setting:
- 0x Anti Aliasing
- 16x anisotropic filtering
To clear up some confusion, I've received some emails regarding this. We do not use the demo, we use the full game in combo with FRAPS to measure performance. And yes, we just upgraded to v1.2
With Medium Image Quality settings up-to 2560x1600 is playable when you activate SLI ... which is pretty okay to be honest.
Mind you that we measure in the absolute toughest section of the game. On the beach with loads of textures, shaders, moving objects. So there certainly are other spots in the game where your graphics card will reproduce much higher framerates.
