Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB

The Call of Duty series is one that needs no introduction. Although only six years old, CoD has already become a stature where both single-player and multi-player first-person shooters are concerned. From the series’ inception, each game has delivered stellar gameplay that totally engrosses you, thanks in part to creative levels, smart AI and realistic graphics.

World at War is officially the 5th game in the series, and while some hardcore fans claim that Treyarch is simply unable to deliver as high caliber a game as Infinity Ward, the title does do well to hold everyone over until Modern Warfare 2 hits (November 10, 2009). One perk is that World at War focuses on battles not exhausted in other war games, which helps to keep things fresh.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen for our testing is “Relentless”, one that depicts the Battle of Peleliu, which has American soldiers advance to capture an airstrip from the Japanese. The level is both exciting to play and incredibly hard on your graphics hardware, making it a perfect choice for our testing.

It can be assumed that most people looking to pick up this card will not be running resolutions much higher than 1680×1050, and that’s good, as it seems to be the sweet spot. As we’ll see throughout the entire article, all of the games we’ve tested with run just fine at that resolution with high detail settings, and in some cases, we can even include anti-aliasing.

At just about 41 FPS at 1680×1050, this card proved more than capable of delivering a smooth gameplay experience. Bumping the resolution up to 1920×1080 didn’t change too much, but the minimum FPS leaves a bit to be desired. Still, if you happen to have a 1080p display, I’m doubtful that you’ll refrain from cranking up all the settings to max.

Not too long after I began testing out the HD 4770, I realized its bottleneck: 512MB. If these cards came equipped with 1GB of GDDR (none do), then I think we’d see much improved performance throughout all our games, and the ability to increase the resolution to 2560×1600 in select titles. In the case of CoD, the performance at 2560x with 0xAA just didn’t come close to the performance at 1920x with 4xAA, so that became our best playable setting.