Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 X2 2GB

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 Call of Duty series is one where ATI’s dual cards work extremely well. It goes without saying… everything else is left in the dust, including NVIDIA’s own dual-GPU 9800 GX2, and also the GTX 280. Of course, “in the dust” may be a poor choice of words given that each card offered extremely good performance.

Although all of our cards performed great, it was only ATI’s dual-GPU cards that managed over 100 FPS while using 8xAA, offering an incredibly crisp, yet fast gameplay experience.