Call of Duty 2 Dual-core Performance: AMD & Intel January 08, 2006 Brandon Sandman Bell

Introduction

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That’s finally starting to change though. With dual-core processors gaining in popularity on the PC desktop, and upcoming next-gen consoles from Microsoft and Sony containing multiple processor cores, game developers are finally starting to focus more of their time on optimizing their software to exploit these hardware developments. Late last year id/Raven collaborated with Intel on incorporating multithreading support into Quake 4, and as you saw in our Quake 4 dual-core performance article, the results were pretty dramatic: we saw gains of up to 69% for Intel’s dual-core CPUs, while Hyper-Threading bought a nice performance boost to the Pentium 4 as well.

And while AMD wasn’t involved even in the project, the Athlon 64 X2 saw substantial performance improvements also.

Now Infinity Ward is getting in on the game too, releasing their dual core patch for Call of Duty 2 merely 10 days after id on Dec 22nd. Like the Quake 4 patch, the Call of Duty 2 patch promises performance improvements for users with dual-core processors, multiple processor systems, and Pentium 4 processors with Hyper-Threading Technology.

With this in mind, we were eager to check it out. Call of Duty 2 is a very graphically-intense game, and as we’ve noted in past is very demanding of even the latest high-end hardware. If this new CoD 2 patch can deliver performance improvements similar to the Quake 4 patch, it could make a dual-core processor a must-have hardware item for any Call of Duty 2 enthusiast.

To accomplish this, we’ve gathered dual-core hardware from both AMD and Intel, as well as a wide range of graphics cards. We were eager to see how CoD 2 performance scaled with faster processors, so we’ve included the Athlon 64 X2 4200 and the flagship X2 4800+ from AMD. (The X2 4800+ not only runs 200MHz faster than the X2 4200+, it also contains twice the cache, with the X2 4800+ outfitted with 1MB of L2 cache per core versus 512KB in the X2 4200+.) On the graphics side, we’ve included cards ranging from the Radeon X800 XL to the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB (dual-core enhancements found in NVIDIA’s current ForceWare drivers interfere with the patched versions of both CoD 2 and Quake 4).

Finally, we included Intel’s dual-core Pentium Extreme Edition 840.

Test Systems

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System Setup

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+

Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840

ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe
ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe

2GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
2GB Corsair XMS 5400 DDR2 SDRAM

ATI Radeon X1800 XT
ATI Radeon X1800 XL
ATI Radeon X800 XL
ATI Radeon X800 256MB
CATALYST 5.13

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

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Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D

CoD 2 4xAA/8xAF

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Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D

What’s going on?

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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.


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.

Intel CoD 2 performance

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Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D

Notes

The situation really doesn’t improve all that much for the Pentium Extreme Edition 840. While we did see a 3% performance improvement for the Radeon X1800 XT 512MB at 800x600, that performance increase slowly whittled its way into negative territory by the time we hit 1600x1200. None of the other graphics cards saw a performance improvement either.

CoD 2 Intel 4xAA/8xAF

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Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D

Conclusion

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When we were done with our testing for this article, we ran a few quick benches with a GeForce 7800 GTX 256MB and saw no gains there either.

It’s possible that the demos we’re using just aren’t built to take advantage of the dual-core optimizations Infinity Ward has built into Call of Duty 2 1.01. Both of the demos we used came from the multiplayer portion of the game; perhaps things would have fared differently in the single-player campaign? Or perhaps Infinity Ward’s optimizations focused on other aspects of the game, such as the AI of German soldiers and friendly NPCs? If that’s the case, traditional benchmarking isn’t always capable of highlighting these types of differences.

Infinity Ward has been pretty mum on the details of this patch – they don’t even provide any type of indication of what kind of performance improvements end users should expect with the patch, so it’s difficult to know what’s going on here. Perhaps we’re testing the wrong aspects of the game with our demos, or perhaps the optimizations just aren’t as significant as everyone had expected in light of the huge gains found in Quake 4? Again, there just isn’t enough information out there to know.

We’ll see if we can get some answers from Infinity Ward/Activision on this, but in the meantime, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed by these results.

Despite today’s lackluster Call of Duty 2 performance results, we’re still extremely bullish on multi-core technology. While there’s only one game out there on the market showing significant gains thanks to dual-core technology, by the end of the year there will be dozens of titles on the market that have been designed with dual-core in mind.

Today’s results indicate that it isn’t easy getting everything up and running, AMD, ATI, Intel, and NVIDIA all need to work together to get their drivers ironed out, and all four must work with game developers to get the proper optimizations in place. (And we in the media may need to tweak the way we test all this software and hardware.) But make no mistake about it, multi-core is the way of the future.