VGA performance: Call of Duty 5: World at War (DX9)

Call of Duty 5: World at War

The raid of Makin Island, one of the first levels, starts with you tied to a chair, faced with a smug Japanese general. He puffs cigar smoke in your face, before turning to one of your comrades and shouting appropriately phrased Japanese at him. The scene is set, and trust me, you'll be focused. World at War throws out the rulebook of war to transform WWII combat through a new enemy, new tactics and an uncensored experience of the climatic battles that gripped a generation. As U.S. Marines and Russian soldiers, players will employ new features like cooperative gameplay, and weapons such as the flamethrower in the most chaotic and cinematically intense experience to date.

Call of Duty World at War uses the exact same 3D engine as Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It does have some new graphics tweaks. We have chosen the level most badass on the GPU, which boils down to the Blood and Iron Tank level. It's a really fun level where you get to drive around in a tank armed with heavy ammunition and a flame thrower, there's just a lot going on. When the level loads up you immediately notice dense vegetation, a decent amount of complex shaders, volumetric smoke, heaps of objects. All in all one of the most heavy on the GPU levels. In fact the rest of the levels would get you 20-25% more performance on average, this one is just more complex to render.

Our image quality settings 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:

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

Did you spot that flat red line in the upper (first) chart? That tells us we ran into a massive bottleneck. So we now know for sure that the 5870 CrossfireX setup can go faster, yet likely the CPU is preventing that. Anyway, ranking high in the top is a good spot to be.

But let's check out the next title, HAWX.