Call of Duty 2
Official Website

The sequel of Call of Duty was released last year and features a whole new graphics engine which really put you in the middle of a war zone in all its terrifying glory. The gameplay is more newbie friendly with the auto-healing and easier to kill enemies, nevertheless with the difficulty cranked up you’ll have many auto-spawning foes to kill.

In the movie below I’m in Bergstein, Germany, ordered to secure the village, it involves close quarter combat, long range sniping and setting up a smoke screen (this effect is very nicely rendered).


Hit Play-Button to see the manual runthrough.

Head to Head

Let’s start out with the low-end cards; at 1024x768 they already struggle to keep the frame rate up, the X800GTO comes out best and the game is actually quite playable with this card. The 6600GT is a close second, the game is unplayable at this resolution with the X1300 Pro.



Increasing the image quality a bit by adding 8x Anisotropic Filtering brings down the FPS for the low end cards, but the mid-range is able to deliver fluent gameplay here:



Quite a surprise to see the X1600XT score so low, almost on par with the X1300 Pro. The 6600GT and X800GTO are a tad too slow at this setting; you’ll need the X1800GTO the get fluent gameplay. The 7600GT is cruising through the game at 35+FPS.

A last bump in resolution makes the game unplayable on most cards:



At 1280x1024 8xAF the game is doable on the 7600GT, the X1800GTO simply can’t keep up here.

Squiggly lines chart

The aging NV6600GT is really holding up well compared to the X1300Pro



The X1800GTO, while being priced on par with the 7600GT, is not able to keep up the pace