The battle of the HTPC cards, Galaxy’s GT 520 vs. HD 6450 (GDDR5 vs. GDDR3)
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, BFG10K. Here is CoD4, first at 1680×1050 resolution with all in-game settings completely maxed out plus 4xAA:
Only our more expensive cards can handle CoD4 at our higher settings. Let’s next test at 1280×720 and will only 2xAA.
We see that a popular multiplayer game is not very playable on entry-level graphics cards and it only plays very smoothly with this generation’s entry-level gaming video cards once they are highly overclocked when the GT 520 and the HD 6450 GDDR5 version trade blows.