High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) is a first person shooter running on a custom engine. There are nice graphics but the engine is somewhat dated compared to others and it runs well on modern PCs. It is the first CoD installment to take place in a modern setting instead of in World War II. It differs from the previous Call of Duty games by having a more film-like plot that uses intermixed story lines from two perspectives; that of a USMC sergeant and a British SAS sergeant. There is also a variety of short missions where players control other characters in flashback sequences to advance the story. Call of Duty 4’s move to modern warfare introduced a variety of modern conventional weapons and technologies including plastic explosives.

There are currently 20 multiplayer maps in CoD4. It is very popular and there is a new expansion for it. For multiplayer, it includes five preset classes and introduces the Perks system. Perks are special abilities which allow users to further customize their character to suit their personal style. Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable.

Here is our HD 4870-X2 at 1920×1200 resolution:

And now with the GTX 280 at 1920×1200:

And now at 1650×1080 with our HD 4870-X2:

And now finallyat 1680×1050 with the GTX 280 :

We see results similar to Unreal Tournament 3.  A popular multiplayer game is very playable even on midrange graphics cards from the last generation and it plays very smoothly with this generation’s video cards and stock clocked CPUs.  However, this time the framerates appear to be tied directly to the CPU’s clockspeed – not the number of cores – and all of our tested configurations breeze through this benchmark.