ASUS GeForce EN9800GT Matrix

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.

There are no surprises here so far. The 9800 GT performs a fair amount better at 1680×1050 and 1920×1200, while it consistently falls behind the slightly more expensive HD 4850.

Since it was possible to play this game at 2560×1600 with the 9600 GT, it was no surprise to see similar performance from our 9800 GT, which gave us close to a 10 FPS performance boost.