 | |||
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Call of Duty 2 High-end Graphics Shootout November 08, 2005 |
|
 |
|
| |
Summary: Wondering which card runs faster for Call of Duty 2? ATI's RADEON X1800 XT 512MB or the GeForce 7800 GTX? Does 512MB of graphics memory make a difference in this game? What about SLI performance? All these questions and more are answered in today's 3D Performance with Call of Duty 2 article. Check it out!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 11 ) |
All new graphics engine
Whereas the original Call of Duty as well as the expansion United Offensive were both based on id Software’s battle-tested Quake 3 engine (a graphics engine Infinity Ward was quite familiar with, having used it for Medal of Honor back when they were at 2015), Call of Duty 2 utilizes an all new DX9 graphics engine Infinity Ward has developed in-house. The new engine sports all kinds of eye candy in the DX9 code path (a DirectX 7 path is also available for older hardware), including some of the best-looking smoke that has ever graced the PC. You’ll find high-resolution textures everywhere, including hi-res normal and specular maps, which are used effectively on the houses and buildings in the Stalingrad campaign, where you’ll be locked up close in urban combat with the German infantry.
The bottom line is that this is one sweet-looking game.
[image]
| <% print_image("01"); %> | <% print_image("02"); %> | <% print_image("03"); %> |
The only downside to all this graphical eye candy though is that Call of Duty 2 can be pretty unforgiving if you’d planned on relying on older hardware to play the game. Like F.E.A.R., Call of Duty 2 requires a pretty cutting-edge system with lots of graphics horsepower at its disposal to deliver crisp frame rates. (We’ve already seen forum posts from eForce 6800 users complaining about poor frame rates.) In fact, CoD 2 is so demanding that we didn’t even crank up all the eye candy settings to their maximums for this article, and we’re testing with the fastest hardware on the planet right now!
As a launch title for the Xbox 360, we have a sneaky suspicion Infinity Ward and Activision spent too much time playtesting CoD 2 on the Xbox 360, rather than the PC.
In any case, with this in mind we figured we’d start off by evaluating Call of Duty’s performance with today’s latest and greatest high-end cards, and work our way down to the mainstream cards later this week.
[image]
| <% print_image("04"); %> | <% print_image("05"); %> | <% print_image("06"); %> |
To test Call of Duty 2, we created our own custom demo, which is taken from the multiplayer map Villers-Bocage, France. Our demo is pretty intensive, with 26 players on the server and smoke grenades popping off everywhere. The screenshots you see here are taken from our custom demo.
[image]
| <% print_image("07"); %> | <% print_image("08"); %> |
Before we get started with the head-to-head ATI vs NVIDIA comparison, let’s see what impact 512MB of graphics memory brings (if any) to performance in Call of Duty 2.
| 512MB vs 256MB Performance | Page:: ( 2 / 11 ) |
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…
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 3 / 11 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe
2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI RADEON X1800 XT 512MB
ATI RADEON X1800 XL 256MB
ATI RADEON X850 XT PE
ATI RADEON X800 XL 256MB
CATALYST 5.10a hotfix driver
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX
NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Ultra
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
Driver version ForceWare 81.87
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Call of Duty 2
| Call of Duty 2 Performance | Page:: ( 4 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 5 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Performance hit: 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 6 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 7 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Performance hit: 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| SLI Performance 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 9 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| SLI Performance 4xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 10 / 11 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 11 / 11 ) |
In our testing, ATI’s RADEON X1800 XT outperformed the GeForce 7800 GTX by up to 19%, with that particular result coming at the most strenuous settings: 1600x1200 screen resolution with 4xAA/8xAF enabled. In general though the RADEON X1800 XT particularly shines once the resolution is cranked up, at 1280x1024 and up the margin was typically in the double-digit range, with the only exception coming when AA/AF were disabled on page four.
We feel that part of this can definitely be attributed to the X1800 XT’s memory bandwidth advantage, after all the board boasts nearly 10GB/sec more of peak bandwidth thanks to its scorching-fast 750MHz GDDR3 memory. But based on our RADEON X800 XL 512MB performance results on page two, we’re also pretty certain that some of that 19% comes from the fact that the X1800 XT board we tested with is outfitted with 512MB of memory. Call of Duty 2 definitely appears to take advantage of the added frame buffer memory 512MB boards sport.
But the performance advantage doesn’t stop with the RADEON X1800 XT, as the X1800 XL manages to outduel its closest competitor, the GeForce 7800 GT.
The performance margins are a little narrower here, with the X1800 XL only managing to pull ahead of the 7800 GT by up to 11% at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF. The X1800 XL and GeForce 7800 GT are much more evenly matched than the 7800 GTX/X1800 XT battle, as they both feature similar figures in texel fill-rate and memory bandwidth, the X1800 XL just manages to run a little faster than the GeForce 7800 GT in Call of Duty 2. It looks as if part of the difference may be because the X1800 XL is a little more efficient at handling AA/AF than the GeForce 7800 GT is, at least for right now.
At the end of the day though, it is always going to come down to price and availability, and in our opinion, while ATI’s got NVIDIA beat in performance, NVIDIA definitely trumps ATI in the other two categories. You’ll just have to decide if the premium X1800 cards are currently selling for is worth it for you.
Among the older, second-generation DX9 cards, it’s a very close battle but NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 series comes out on top. The GeForce 6800 Ultra managed to outpace the X850 XT PE, while the 6800 GT also ran faster than the X800 XL. Of course, all this is with AA and AF.
In case you’re interested in SLI, Call of Duty 2 definitely scales well with the technology. In some cases we saw a performance improvement of more than 2x for the 6800 GT! It’s possible that with a faster CPU, we could’ve seen more cases of that with the GeForce 7 cards as well.
Speaking of SLI, before we leave we thought we’d drop you CoD 2 users a tip you might want to try. It has been mentioned in forums that CoD 2’s “Optimize for SLI” setting has been providing more performance for some gamers. We gave it a try real quick and noted that performance does indeed improve slightly once the setting is enabled, even if you’re running a single card configuration. Ironically enough, the setting helped the X800 XL we tested with as well. More details on this in Part 2 of our CoD 2 performance articles!