512MB vs 256MB Performance

If you recall our first CoD performance article, the original Call of Duty was one of the first games to take advantage of 256MB graphics cards.

At the time many had dismissed ATI’s RADEON 9800 PRO 256MB as a board that was too expensive with no purpose, as it performed just like a 9800 PRO 128MB in most of the games at that time. However, if you enabled CoD’s “Extra” texture quality mode and cranked up the AA and screen resolution, you’d see a substantial boost in performance. At 1280x1024 with 4xAA/8xAF, we noted a difference of 6% between the 9800 PRO 128MB and 256MB. This margin grew to a whopping 35% by 1600x1200! With this in mind, we were eager to see if CoD 2 was as forward-looking as its predecessor, so we grabbed a RADEON X800 XL 512MB and started benchmarking:

Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D

As you can see, the extra memory present on the X800 XL 512MB definitely had an impact on performance. We saw improvements at all resolutions, on average you’re looking at roughly an extra 9 frames per second in performance, with a percentage improvement of about 1.5x!

Let’s take a look at the test system and graphics cards we used for testing…