Call of Duty 2

Still widely considered one of the most visually stunning games around, Infinity Ward/Activision’s Call of Duty 2 is one of the most ideal benchmarking platforms we could think of. While the volumetric smoke effects and complex textures in the game keep your graphics card sweating, the physics engine and 3D environments can cause your CPU to have a lot of trouble as well. We tested Call of Duty 2 on the highest and lowest graphics setting sets and four different resolutions. We have also revised our previous testing procedure for this game due to complaints that the multiplayer demo we were using was not a good representation of the game. After playing through the single player campaign, we couldn’t agree more. Our new test is based off of three different single player demos; one at the Point Du Hoc landing, one in Stalingrad, and one in some city in Africa that we can’t remember the name of. There is a very, very good sampling of all the different effects in this game in these three demos, and we think they are here to stay. We hope to make these demos available to you sometime in the future, but as of now they are over 800MB combined.



CoD2 utilizes symmetric multi-processing, as we explained in our previous article entitled “The Effect of Dual Core Patches”. From the results, it would stand to reason that the implementation here does indeed make use of four cores. We’re not entirely convinced that it does, however. One possible explanation for this is that while the results are different from what we saw in Quake 4, they are consistent with the fact that CoD2 is a much more taxing game than Quake 4. This means that although only two cores are being used in CoD2 gameplay, they are being entirely used, and any outside CPU load will negatively affect performance on dual core systems. Again, this is where quad cores shine, as performance hits are minimal with the QX6700.