Introduction

As we showed you in last week’s Call of Duty 2 High-end Graphics Shootout article, Infinity Ward’s latest creation is a pretty demanding title for even today’s latest high-end graphics cards. Frame rates in the 30s and 40s weren’t uncommon, especially once the AA and AF were cranked up.

This can partially be blamed on the fact that our demo is pretty graphics-intensive. As we mentioned before, we were playing on a pretty full server (26 out of 32 max players), and there’s quite a bit of action in the demo, with both smoke and frag grenades popping off. As anyone who’s played the game can tell you, Call of Duty 2’s smoke looks gorgeous and plays a very important role in the game. In the single-player campaign you’ll end up using smoke to obscure your movement during many an MG42 or tank rush. It’s arguably the most notable addition Infinity Ward has added to the game.

Lots of smoke down there

I guess it is not too bad...

...Yet

More smoke

The only downside to smoke is that it will kill your frame rate quicker than anything the Germans will ever do to you.

Besides smoke, we think another reason why everyone’s reporting such low frame rates with CoD 2 is simply the design of the game itself. For CoD 2, Infinity Ward has cranked up the intensity for everything. CoD 2 features larger maps than its predecessor and squad-level (or greater) combat. You’ll also encounter mortar/artillery fire on a number of occasions. In other words, cranking up the realism factor has apparently had a negative affect on frame rate. When all this is added together with the fact that this is Infinity Ward’s first stab at designing a graphics engine of their own (their previous efforts in Call of Duty and Medal of Honor used the Quake 3 engine), everything begins to add up. Conspiracy theorists will probably still blame Xbox 360 though.

To counter all this, you’re going to have to crank your settings down a bit.

We think we found an acceptable compromise for the mainstream cards we’re testing today. By turning on CoD 2’s “Optimize for SLI” setting, we saw a pretty nice performance boost, but more on that later. We also turned off the “soften smoke edges” setting, turned down the number of dynamic lights to low, and dialed down our texture settings. You can see our settings used here:

The cards

In addition to industry veterans like the GeForce 6800 GT/6600 GT and RADEON X800/X800 XL, we’ve also added NVIDIA’s recently launched GeForce 6800 GS to the mix.

While it’s based on older GeForce 6 technology, the GeForce 6800 GS is a product we’re pretty excited about. The card sports copper cooling and is built on the exact same PCB NVIDIA uses on their higher-end GeForce 7800 GT cards. In other words, this board was built from the ground up for high clock speeds, and has all the raw ingredients you’d want to see in an overclocker’s board. Before we get into the performance of the cards though, let’s take a quick look at image quality.