Sapphire Radeon HD 4670 GDDR4 & HD 4830

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.

Given the fact that we’re dealing with two budget graphics cards, I didn’t expect too much at all in terms of performance throughout any of our tests, but we’re off to a good start here. The only “playable” setting in all of these goes to the HD 4830 at the 1680×1050 resolution, but overall, the performance is impressive across the board, especially since we’re taxing the cards with our 4x anti-aliasing setting.

But, by turning AA off, we were able to run the game just fine on both cards at 1920×1200, with max detail settings. I should note that while the HD 4670 scored only 28 FPS overall, I was impressed by how playable it actually was, especially since we feel this to be the most demanding level in the entire game. CoD: World at War at 1920 on a ~$60 GPU? Sounds great to me.