Introduction

Once again we’re out to explore the performance of Infinity Ward’s new shooter, Call of Duty. This week, we’re focusing on performance with NVIDIA hardware. The GeForce line is a well established brand with millions of users, so it was important that we not only include NVIDIA’s latest and greatest cards, but also their older products like the GeForce3. To represent NVIDIA’s DX7 hardware, we also included the GeForce2 Ti. It’s important to note that for this card in particular, anti-aliasing didn’t seem to work, which may not be a bad thing considering the capabilities of the hardware.

Like the ATI performance article, all visual quality settings were cranked up to their maximums, while all sound settings were dialed down to their minimums. Infinity Ward adds a unique “NVIDIA Distance Fog” setting for GeForce owners only. As its name implies, when enabled this setting adds a layer of fog, obscuring objects in the distance (much like you’d see on a console game).

This reduces the rendering workload on the graphics processor and thus enhances performance; the exact boost can vary depending on the complexity of the scene as well as screen resolution. The default setting is “enabled” but we disabled this setting for our testing to ensure an apples-to-apples performance comparison with our ATI results. Also, to help speed things along we ran the GeForce3 and GeForce2 Ti with bilinear filtering rather than trilinear. Here’s the rest of the system setup:

System Setup

Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe

ABIT Siluro GeForce FX 5900 OTES (128MB)
ASUS V9950 Ultra (GeForce FX 5900 Ultra)
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5600 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5700 Ultra
eVGA e-GeForce FX 5950 Ultra
MSI GeForce FX5600-VTDR128 (GeForce FX 5600 128MB)
MSI GeForce FX5200-VTDR128 (GeForce FX 5200 128MB)
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 Ultra reference card
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4600 reference card
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 reference card
NVIDIA GeForce3 reference card
NVIDIA GeForce2 Ti reference card

512MB OCZ EL PC3200 (DDR400) SDRAM

Driver version ForceWare 52.16

30GB IBM Deskstar DTLA 307030 ATA/100 Hard Drive

Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live!

Windows XP Professional

DirectX 9.0b

Benchmarks

Call of Duty