Call of Duty 2

CoD2 is still one of the top 5 most graphically intense games out there, despite it having been out for more than a year and half now. Volumetric smoke, large outdoor scenes, motion blur, and crazy firefights make this game a must for any testing suite. The game does a number on even the most current graphics hardware at high resolutions, that much is evident by just taking a quick peek at the numbers.


All numbers under 65 point to this game being a graphics powerhouse. All numbers being similar point to this game not taking a liking to CrossFire. We suspect that the CrossFire drivers are not optimized for certain games, and that CoD2 and Oblivion are two of those games. Unfortunately we were unable to run CoD2 on any of the other graphics cards that graced this system over the past month, again due to time constraints.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl

STALKER is a new game in our repertoire, and after our experiences testing with it for this review, it looks like it might just become a mainstay. Not only does STALKER look incredible with details cranked, the different performance options that can be toggled allows the user to test different features of the video card (almost) independently of one another. There are two demos recorded by the developers that are available for download in various locations on the net. One of the demos is a flyby of a bunch of buildings and railroad tracks in some abandoned factory or something. The other demo is a flythrough of bushes and grass and stuff in a dusk scene. Both have their fair share of graphically intense bits, with the ladder tending to be a bit more difficult.



You can see here that performance is enhanced greatly by enabling CrossFire in the game. Not only that, but performance under CrossFire is extremely impressive. We noticed next-to-no stutter in the demo playbacks when CrossFire was enabled. Unfortunately we did not have STALKER available when testing the G80-based cards so performance numbers for those cards under the game were unattainable.