AMD Value Platform Analysis Part 2: The Performance

Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4:Modern Warfare was one of the most successful games of 2007.  It was the top-selling game worldwide for 2007, selling over seven million copies by January 2008. It uses a proprietary game engine that includes features such as true world-dynamic lightning, HDR lighting effects, dynamics shadows, and depth of field. It features a fictional story set in the near-future. The most well-received part of the game is its multiplayer modes, where you earn experience points for kills and completing certain tasks online. These experience points unlock certain abilities and new and more powerful guns which can tip the balance in your favor in online matches.

For testing this game, I recorded a timedemo on the “Vacant” map. The demo was recorded while trying to capture some of the most graphically intense sections of the game like throwing a smoke grenade and then walking and shooting in it which really brings all the cards to their knees resulting in the minimum FPS. The demo was played back at normal speed with the demo command from the console and the results were recorded by FRAPS.

Here are the settings used:

The HD 4650 provides a pretty smooth experience except where we pass through the smoke resulting in the dip in FPS in all of the cards. Considering we are using 4AA, this has to be considered a  pretty good result. You could always relax the settings on AA if you desire more FPS.

Let’s take a look at 1920×1200 performance:

Again we see the smoke section bringing the HD 4870 and the HD 4890 to their knees, and just managing to stay playable.

Shown below is the screenshot from Rivatuner showing the CPU and GPU usage with the benchmark running on the HD 4650 stock configuration at 1280×1024 resolution.

The videos below show the overclocked HD 4650 configuration running the benchmark. The Youtube’s HD stream is 720p 2Mbps, while the Blip stream is 1080p 6Mbps high quality.