Call of Duty 4

Call of Duty 4 is back on PC, the last installment was COD2 which was WW2 orientated, COD4 takes us to the near future where we now have the fight our way through cities and duck from enemy snipers, charge encampments in the middle of the night with green tinted goggles strapped on our heads. As with the previous games, COD4 is a fast paced game with an arcade approach the FPS shooter genre. Respawning enemies and unlimited “health” are just some of the features which make this game less than realistic, but not less entertaining.

The game engine can be quite taxing once you crank everything up to maximum settings, but the end result is worth it, with realistic smoke effects and large scale battles.



We played through the first 10 minutes of the single player demo (which is unfortunately pretty much the life span of this demo) and noted min/avg FPS.



At 1024x768 and Medium quality the new game is very playable on these mid-range video cards, both 8600 GT cards surpass the 7600 GT, the Sparkle is in the lead.



Increasing the resolution and quality settings has a disastrous effect on the performance of the 7600 GT, with average not reaching 30 FPS, the 8600 GT handle the increased GFX load better, offering average FPS around 40 with dips to 20.

Unreal Tournament 3

After the original Unreal Tournament 99, the successors 2003 and 2004 they are now back to a smaller number, Unreal Tournament 3 or UT3 for short is based on… the Unreal 3 engine and sports high resolutions textures, models, maps, driving a fast paced Death Match orientated game, with vehicle based CTF and other gameplay modes.



Surprisingly, as with Call of Duty 4, this brand new game proved not that taxing for mid-range hardware, even with high quality settings UT3 was quite playable at higher resolutions. We tested at 1280x1024 (no AA/AF) and played through a Death Match session on the demo’s Heat Ray DM map.



The Unreal 3 engine works noticeably better on 8 series NV hardware as the 8600 GT cards have a comfortable lead over the 7600 GT. The Club 3D is trailing the Sparkle slightly here.

Next we loaded up the Suspense CTF map which features a bunch of cars and hovercrafts to help you capture the enemy flag.



The Suspense map is larger and slightly more stressful on these cards, the ranking doesn’t change however.

Onto noise, power usage and temperature tests ->