ASUS EN9800GTX+ 512MB Dark Knight

Crysis Warhead might have the ability to bring any system to its knees even with what we consider to be reasonable settings, but Call of Duty 4 manages to look great regardless of your hardware, as long as it’s reasonably current. It’s also one of the few games on the market that will actually benefit from having a multi-core processor, although Quad-Cores offer no performance gain over a Dual-Core of the same frequency.

For our testing, we use a level called The Bog. The reason is simple… it looks great, plays well and happens to be incredibly demanding on the system. It takes place at night, but there is more gunfire, explosions, smoke, specular lighting and flying corpses than you can shake an assault rifle at.

Because the game runs well on all current mid-range GPUs at reasonable graphic settings, we max out what’s available to us, which includes enabling 4xAA and 8xAF, along with choosing the highest available options for everything else.

The story continues here, with the GTX+ scaling quite well when compared to the original model. It also scales well compared to the HD 4850, which costs about $20 less on average (if you look hard enough).

Although the 4xAA setting at 2560×1600 as seen in our graph above was “playable” enough, it wasn’t completely fluid as we’d hope, despite running at 55FPS. Like the original 9800 GTX, disabling AA entirely boosts up performance and the game becomes much smoother.