What’s going on?

After looking over the results, we were extremely surprised. The Athlon 64 X2 4200+ system failed to yield any performance improvements in Call of Duty 2 1.01, regardless of the graphics card used. Our efforts with AMD’s flagship Athlon 64 X2 4800+ proved equally fruitless -- regardless of the configuration we used, we didn’t see any performance improvements from the new Call of Duty 2 patch.

Based on all this, we can’t lay blame to anything on the hardware-side. We tried two different processors, one high-end Athlon 64 X2 CPU, and one lower-end X2 CPU, so we’re not being held back by the processor. Likewise, we’ve got high-end and lower-end graphics cards being tested, and neither shows any kind of performance gains. On the contrary, we in fact actually saw slight performance declines with the Call of Duty 2 1.01 patch – only at 1600x1200, where the graphics card is maxed out and becomes bottlenecked, do we finally see performance between the two versions of CoD 2 flatten out. This pattern even repeats itself under 4xAA/8xAF.

After seeing the opposite in the beta Quake 4 patch, we were concerned that perhaps we’d setup something wrong, so we reformatted the system and started all over again only to get the same basic results. No performance gains were found, only slight declines. We even hopped on a server and created a less stressful demo on a different map. The performance drop wasn’t quite as pronounced with this demo, but we still didn’t see any performance gains.

We’re positive everything is running properly, because we could clearly see in the lower left corner that we were running version 1.01 of the game. The console was also slightly reworked in 1.01, as we no longer have to scroll through the console in order to see our frame rate. Unfortunately, 1.01 doesn’t provide a console command to turn the dual-core optimizations on or off like Quake 4 does, instead it auto-detects your processor and turns on the optimizations on its own automatically. This means we don’t really know if it’s just not loading the optimizations properly, or if the optimizations themselves only benefit Intel processors. The patch is titled “cod2intelpatch_101.exe” after all, and Infinity Ward doesn’t hide the fact that they worked with Intel to bring this patch to market, stating “Infinity Ward worked closely with Intel to improve Call of Duty 2 performance on systems with HT Technology, multiple processors, or dual core processors..”

So with that in mind, lets take a look at Call of Duty 2 1.01’s performance with one of Intel’s fastest dual-core processors on the market, the Pentium Extreme Edition 840.