Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

When the original Call of Duty game launched in 2003, Infinity Ward was an unknown. Naturally… it was the company’s first title. But since then, the series and company alike have become household names. Not only has the series delivered consistently incredible gameplay, it’s pushed the graphics envelope with each successive release, and where Modern Warfare is concerned, it’s also had a rich storyline.

The first two titles might have been built on the already-outdated Quake III engine, but since then, the games have been built with improved graphical features, capable of pushing the highest-end PCs out there. Modern Warfare 2 is the first such exception, as it’s more of a console port than a true PC title. Therefore, the game doesn’t push PC hardware as much as we’d like to see, but despite that, it still looks great, and lacks little in the graphics department. You can read our review of the game here.

Manual Run-through: The level chosen is the 10th mission in the game, “The Gulag”. Our teams fly in helicopters up to an old prison with the intention of getting closer to finding the game’s villain, Vladimir Makarov. Our saved game file begins us at the point when the level name comes on the screen, right before we reach the prison, and it ends after one minute of landing, following the normal progression of the level. The entire run takes around two-and-a-half minutes.

From a technical standpoint, the HD 5750 should be on par with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTS 250, but it fell behind in our test here. I admit I was a bit surprised by this, but repeated testing delivered identical results. That doesn’t mean the HD 5750 is a chump, because it still delivered over 60 FPS at 1920×1080 with 4xAA, which means it has what it takes to power what the majority of gamers out there want to see.

With the previous Call of Duty we regularly tested with, World at War, I found that anything between 30 – 40 FPS was deemed playable. Things change a bit with Modern Warfare 2, however, and I find that even 45 FPS can deliver sticky frames and less-than-ideal gameplay. But as soon as 50 FPS is hit, the game runs without a hitch. As a result, we had to disable the anti-aliasing, which boosted the performance to almost exactly that on our HD 5750.