ATI’s Eyefinity: 18 Games Benched on 3 and 6 Displays

When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally… it was the company’s first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it’s pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it’s also had a rich storyline.

The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the highest-end PCs out there. Modern Warfare 2 is the first such exception, as it’s more of a console port than a true PC title. Therefore, the game doesn’t push PC hardware as much as we’d like to see, but despite that, it still looks great, and lacks little in the graphics department. You can read our review of the game here.

I have to admit that it’s a bit ironic that we’re beginning with this title, because of all we tested with, this one is one of the few that doesn’t support Eyefinity well at all. At 5760×2160, the game for the most part is fine, and generally everything looks good. But it wasn’t until I tested the game out at 5760×1080 that I realized just how poorly designed the game is.

As you can see in the bottom screenshot above, the game doesn’t scale across three monitors well at all, as the entire game is literally squished. On six monitors, the issue really isn’t noticeable because it has a far more natural aspect ratio. On three displays, though, there’s zero point to loading the game up as the result is ugly, and headache-inducing.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen is the 10th mission in the game, “The Gulag”. Our teams fly in helicopters up to an old prison with the intention of getting closer to finding the game’s villain, Vladimir Makarov. Our saved game file begins us at the point when the level name comes on the screen, right before we reach the prison, and it ends after one minute of landing, following the normal progression of the level. The entire run takes around two-and-a-half minutes.

All of our configurations worked rather well, even a single GPU at 5760×2160. At 38 FPS on average, the gameplay wasn’t silky-smooth, but it was far from being unplayable. With that performance, I had no trouble with the gameplay, so if I had to choose to stick with the graphics settings or lower them, I would stick with them. If you prefer the highest FPS possible and only have a single GPU, disabling the anti-aliasing will make a rather sizable difference.

Since the game was completely playable throughout all of our configurations at the game’s maxed-out settings, our best playable perfectly equal our results from the graph above.