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3D Performance with Call of Duty 2: Mainstream Cards November 16, 2005 Brandon Sandman Bell |
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Summary: Wondering how today's latest mainstream graphics cards perform in Call of Duty 2? If so, you may want to check out this article. Inside we've got single-card and SLI benchmarks for the 6600 GT, 6800, 6800 GS, and 6800 GT; while ATI users may want to check out our results with the X700 PRO, X800, X1600 XT, and X800 XL. See how all the cards look and perform in our latest article!
 Introduction | Page:: ( 1 / 15 ) |
This can partially be blamed on the fact that our demo is pretty graphics-intensive. As we mentioned before, we were playing on a pretty full server (26 out of 32 max players), and there’s quite a bit of action in the demo, with both smoke and frag grenades popping off. As anyone who’s played the game can tell you, Call of Duty 2’s smoke looks gorgeous and plays a very important role in the game. In the single-player campaign you’ll end up using smoke to obscure your movement during many an MG42 or tank rush. It’s arguably the most notable addition Infinity Ward has added to the game.
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The only downside to smoke is that it will kill your frame rate quicker than anything the Germans will ever do to you.
Besides smoke, we think another reason why everyone’s reporting such low frame rates with CoD 2 is simply the design of the game itself. For CoD 2, Infinity Ward has cranked up the intensity for everything. CoD 2 features larger maps than its predecessor and squad-level (or greater) combat. You’ll also encounter mortar/artillery fire on a number of occasions. In other words, cranking up the realism factor has apparently had a negative affect on frame rate. When all this is added together with the fact that this is Infinity Ward’s first stab at designing a graphics engine of their own (their previous efforts in Call of Duty and Medal of Honor used the Quake 3 engine), everything begins to add up. Conspiracy theorists will probably still blame Xbox 360 though.
To counter all this, you’re going to have to crank your settings down a bit.
We think we found an acceptable compromise for the mainstream cards we’re testing today. By turning on CoD 2’s “Optimize for SLI” setting, we saw a pretty nice performance boost, but more on that later. We also turned off the “soften smoke edges” setting, turned down the number of dynamic lights to low, and dialed down our texture settings. You can see our settings used here:
The cards
In addition to industry veterans like the GeForce 6800 GT/6600 GT and RADEON X800/X800 XL, we’ve also added NVIDIA’s recently launched GeForce 6800 GS to the mix.
While it’s based on older GeForce 6 technology, the GeForce 6800 GS is a product we’re pretty excited about. The card sports copper cooling and is built on the exact same PCB NVIDIA uses on their higher-end GeForce 7800 GT cards. In other words, this board was built from the ground up for high clock speeds, and has all the raw ingredients you’d want to see in an overclocker’s board. Before we get into the performance of the cards though, let’s take a quick look at image quality.
| Image quality | Page:: ( 2 / 15 ) |
Anti-aliasing
We’ll start by taking a look at the 4xAA modes for ATI and NVIDIA’s latest mainstream offerings, the RADEON X1600 XT (which hasn’t hit retail shelves yet) and the GeForce 6800 GS. First our sample image of both cards with AA disabled:
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And now 4xAA:
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RADEON X1600 XT 4xMSAA
GeForce 6800 GS 4xMSAA
Other than the subtle differences you’re always going to see whenever comparing the image quality of cards from two different manufacturers, there aren’t any glaring deficiencies in one board that the other exploits. The cables hanging from the telephone poles on both cards look similar, and each does an equally poor job of handling the gated entry in front of us. Of course, this is a perfect case for the X1600’s adaptive AA mode, which can apply supersampling to select areas to improve image quality (NVIDIA has similar technology in their GeForce 7 series cards dubbed transparency AA, but not GeForce 6):
Gate w/ RADEON X1600 XT 4xAA
Gate w/GeForce 6800 GS 4xAA
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Gate w/ RADEON X1600 XT 4xAA & Adaptive AA
As you can see, once adaptive AA is turned on, most of the jaggies that were present before on the gate are now gone.
With the advantage of transparency AA, we’re giving the AA edge to ATI’s RADEON X1600 XT, but it’s only because of adaptive AA.
Anisotropic filtering
Infinity Ward uses fog extensively throughout many of CoD 2’s maps to enhance the game’s visuals, unfortunately it’s what you see in our AF shots below, so try not to focus on it too much:
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With the exception of the bank of fog, it’s pretty hard to spot any differences in AF quality between the two boards. Edges look a little softer on the ATI board, but that’s completely subjective:
RADEON X1600 XT 8xAF
GeForce 6800 GS 8xAF
Improving CoD 2’s performance
One performance tip that’s rising in popularity for CoD 2’s is to enable the game’s “Optimize for SLI” setting. We were curious to see just how much of an improvement the setting brings. Let’s take a look shall we?
| Optimizing performance | Page:: ( 3 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
Notes
Even without AA/AF, turning on the “Optimize for SLI” setting brought immediate performance benefits to both the NVIDIA, and even ATI cards. At 800x600 alone we saw a 15% performance improvement for both the GeForce 6800 GS, RADEON X1600 XT and RADEON X800 XL, while GeForce 6600 GT’s performance improved by 13% at the same resolution. The margins begin to tighten up though once the resolution is increased.
4xAA/4xAF
Notes
Once again we saw tangible performance improvements by turning on the SLI setting, even though we’re running single-card configs here. You’ll see the best improvement at lower resolutions though.
| Test Systems | Page:: ( 4 / 15 ) |
System Setup
AMD Athlon 64 3500+
DFI nF4 Ultra INFINITY
1GB OCZ DDR400 SDRAM
ATI RADEON X1600 XL 256MB
ATI RADEON X800 XL 256MB
ATI RADEON X800 256MB
ATI RADEON X700 PRO 128MB
CATALYST 5.11
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GS
NVIDIA GeForce 6800 256MB
NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT
Driver version ForceWare 81.94
250GB Maxtor Hard Drive Maxline III SATA Hard Drive w/16MB Cache
Windows XP Professional SP1
DirectX 9.0c
Benchmarks
Call of Duty 2
| Call of Duty 2 Performance | Page:: ( 5 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 8xAF | Page:: ( 6 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 2xAA | Page:: ( 7 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 8 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 4xAA | Page:: ( 9 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| CoD 2 4xAA/4xAF | Page:: ( 10 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| SLI Performance 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 11 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| SLI Performance 2xAA/8xAF | Page:: ( 12 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| SLI Performance 4xAA/4xAF | Page:: ( 13 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
| 128MB vs 256MB Memory Performance | Page:: ( 14 / 15 ) |
Call of Duty 2 – Direct3D
4xAA/4xAF
Notes
While we didn’t see any performance impact from the 256MB GeForce 6600 GT card until we cranked up the AA and screen resolution, we’re not saying that CoD 2 doesn’t take advantage of 256MB or more of graphics memory. In fact it’s quite the contrary. It just so happens though that in order to do that, you’ll have to crank up the game’s graphics settings so high that the card becomes unplayable anyway. Remember, today we’re testing with texture resolution set to “Normal”. There are two more settings higher than this one, “High” and “Extra”.
| Conclusion | Page:: ( 15 / 15 ) |
Of course, we should also mention that the performance difference between the three boards is negligible at high resolutions (1280x1024 and up) once the AA/AF is cranked up. The X800 XL really only pulls away from the others in tests with AA/AF disabled, or 2xAA/0xAF.
NVIDIA’s GeForce 6800 and 6600 GT run neck-and-neck with each other in performance. The GeForce 6800 doesn’t really break away from the 6600 GT until 4xAA is turned on. In all other cases, the 6600 GT really gives the more expensive GeForce 6800 a run for its money. Like the X800 XL, the vanilla RADEON X800 outperforms both cards until anisotropic filtering is turned on.
Meanwhile, the RADEON X1600 XT put up a stronger showing in Call of Duty 2 than it has with many other games we’ve tested the card with in the past. Whereas in previous tests it has sometimes had a hard time outpacing the GeForce 6800, in our tests with CoD 2 it clearly delivered better performance, in some cases outrunning the GeForce 6800 by a pretty large margin. The X1600 XT was also able to outrun its older predecessor, the X800 256MB. This kind of showing was definitely a surprise to us in light of previous testing with the card. With this kind of performance, we think ATI probably would have been better off delaying benchmarks with this card until it was closer to being ready. After all, as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Unfortunately for ATI, many have already written this card off based on the first round of preview articles from last month.
Now granted, we still can’t justify the RADEON X1600 XT’s exorbitant $249 price tag, as clearly the GeForce 6800 GS delivers better performance at a lower price, and is our top pick in the mainstream segment right now, but if the X1600 XT were priced around $170, it would definitely be one of the better buys on the market.
Until that occurs though, the GeForce 6800 GS is a no-brainer. You’re essentially getting GeForce 6800 GT performance at a $200-$250 price tag. And once you pair two of these boards together, you’ll get performance that’s greater than a GeForce 7800 GT. NVIDIA’s really got a terrific product on their hands with the GeForce 6800 GS. And if you can’t afford a shiny new 6800 GS, based on our results today, it looks like the 6600 GT would make an excellent alternative at the $150 price point.