EVGA’s GTX 550 Ti “free performance” evaluation
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (CoD4) is a first person shooter running on a custom engine. It has 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 about 20 multiplayer maps in CoD4. It is still very popular. CoD Modern Warfare 2 was also released with updated visuals but it is also not very demanding on graphics cards.
Our timedemo benchmark was created by ABT’s own Senior Editor and lead reviewer, BFG10K. It is very accurate and totally repeatable. Here is CoD4, first at 2560×1600 resolution with all in-game settings completely maxed out plus 4xAA:
Another no show with the HD 5770 due to driver issues with OpenGL. Let’s next test at 1920×1200.
We see that a popular multiplayer game is very playable even on midrange graphics cards and it plays very smoothly with this generation’s top video cards. The GTX 550 Ti does an admirable job compared with the GTX 450 that it replaces and it scales nicely with increasing clockspeeds. This game would be very playable completely maxed-out at the GTX 550’s target resolution of 1680×1050 or with a bit less anti-aliasing applied at 1920×1080.
I am just getting around to it but i must say very nice review apoppins! As always your vast selection of games and benchmarks is top notch. Its so complete. I know you used it a lot, but I wouldve liked to have seen 1680 x 1050 results for every game. You may have only skipped it when the 550ti was doing very well at 1920×1200 and thats fine. But i feel like 1680×1050 is intended for this card and although at times it can obviously do well at higher resolutions, the 1680×1050 should be the starting point in all the test.
Dont get me wrong, your review was great. I just think cards intended for a certain resolution often get reviewed in much higher resolutions which doesnt do them much justice. Your review does do the 550ti justice though, its very full and useful.
Thank-you!
Again, the reason for leaving 1680×1050 out came down to time. Or a lack of it.
I did try to compensate by finding settings that approached playability and I hope we can revisit the GTX 550 Ti in another article. I did some further testing of the GTX 550 Ti in the HD 6670/6570 launch article, in fact.
Galaxy is sponsoring our May contest – the prizes will include a GTX 550 Ti and a GTX 560 Ti.