XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition

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.

Our results here are not much different from what we saw with Crysis. Although the GTX 260/216 performed slower than the GTX 280, the differences are incredibly minor, and “incredibly minor” might be an understatement.

Like the bigger brother, the best playable setting with CoD4 is the same as the max setting we test with, 2560×1600 with 4xAA and all the goodies enabled. That delivers over 80FPS and it’s hard to be upset with performance like that.