Date:
Monday , January 12, 2009
Author:
Mark Warner
Editor:
Brent Justice
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CoD: World at War Gameplay Performance and IQ

The fifth installment in the Call of Duty series is here, and we've got it under the microscope. We look at performance and IQ on six of today's most popular video cards to tell you which is the best buy for you.

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Test Setup

We are using an Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9770 CPU on an ASUS Blitz Extreme Motherboard and 4GB of OCZ Platinum Series DDR3-1600.

While it might be a bit of “overkill,” we use the QX9650 overclocked quad-core processor at 3.6GHz in an attempt to keep from putting our evaluation into a position of being CPU limited. Obviously, we make every effort to not use CPU limited games for video card evaluations, but the 3.6GHz processor seems to put many peoples’ minds at ease when it comes to that subject.

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Comparison Setup

We are using the latest available drivers from NVIDIA and AMD at the time of evaluation. For the NVIDIA GPU based video cards we are using driver version 181.20 WHQL. For the AMD video cards Cat 8.12 WHQL is being used. The newer AMD drivers received and used here came too late in the process of this evaluation to use. These new drivers do not have any noted performance differences in this game over Catalyst 8.12, and should not have any noticeable difference in performance. These new AMD drivers coming out soon focus on DX10 multi-threaded performance, and this game is DX9.

We evaluate what each video card configuration can supply us in terms of a playable gaming experience while supplying the best culmination of resolution and “eye candy” graphical settings. We focus on quality and immersion of the gameplay experience rather than how many frames per second the card can get in a canned benchmark or prerecorded timedemo situation that often do not represent real gameplay like you would experience at home. Then we will follow with apples-to-apples testing based on real gameplay as well.