ATI Radeon HD 4890 & NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275

While some popular game franchises are struggling to keep themselves healthy, Call of Duty doesn’t have much to worry about. This is Treyarch’s third go at a game in the series, and a first for one that’s featured on the PC. All worries leading up to this title were all for naught, though, as Treyarch delivered on all promises.

To help keep things fresh, CoD: World at War focuses on battles not exhaustively explored in previous WWII-inspired games. These include battles which take place in the Pacific region, Russia and Berlin, and variety is definitely something this game pulls off well, so it’s unlikely you’ll be off your toes until the end of the game.

For our testing, we use a level called “Relentless”, as it’s easily one of the most intensive levels in the game. It features tanks, a large forest environment and even a few explosions. This level depicts the Battle of Peleliu, where American soldiers advance to capture an airstrip from the Japanese. It’s a level that’s both exciting to play and one that can bring even high-end systems to their knees.

At each one of our resolutions, NVIDIA manages to come out on top, and also beats out what was NVIDIA’s top-end card last summer, the GTX 280. The per-vendor performance differences are far more impressive on the ATI side of things though, where we can see the HD 4890 sky-rocket up past the HD 4870 1GB.

Since both of the cards here performed well at 2560×1600, our best-playable settings mimic what’s seen in the final graph above. NVIDIA’s card was noticeably better, but nothing was lacking where the HD 4890 was concerned.