Call of Duty 2
The original Call of Duty game was known for its very realistic representation of the chaos of war along with fierce battles. The Call of Duty 2 continues this tradition and brings more graphics effects and better image quality in general. The new incarnation of the game also does not use the good-old Quake III engine, but utilizes the DirectX 9 engine developed by Infinity Ward in-house. The new technology features real-time lighting and shadows, advanced smoke effects, normal mapping, specular lighting and even subtler effects, such as heat shimmer and so on.
High-End Graphics Cards
The new engine from Infinity Ward seems to be a demanding one: none of the high-end graphics boards left 60 frames per second barrier behind in the Call of Duty 2 game in 1600x1200 resolution. Moreover, only the two fastest graphics cards currently available ?the GeForce 7800 GTX 512 and the RADEON X1800 XT 512MB ?managed to surpass the 60fps landmark even in 1280x1024!
The eye candy mode does not bring any surprises: only the most expensive GeForce 7800 and the RADEON X1800 attain respectable results and no board is capable of conquering 60fps in 1600x1200 with highest quality settings along with FSAA and AF.
Please note significant performance drops of ATI RADEON-based graphics cards with 256MB of memory when the FSAA and AF re enabled. We did not experience this with NVIDIA GeForce 7800-series and believe that there is a memory management flaw in ATI?s Catalyst driver that limits performance in the Call of Duty 2 game and may affect some other titles.
Top-of-the-line products from ATI and NVIDIA show virtually equal performance in Call of Duty 2.
