Call of Duty

Call of Duty is based off the highly-acclaimed Quake 3 engine. But the core of the engine is where it stops. Call of Duty has been heavily modified to take advantage of hardware transform and lighting, pixel shaders and vertex programs available on the latest hardware, making this a good game to test OpenGL performance.

I used Fraps and took three preset runs through a map spanning multiple resolutions of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The three results were then divided by three to reduce margin of error. The internal game settings were set to max.

Call of Duty Results

Looking at the results here, you can't help but be left with a good impression. NVIDIA's OpenGL drivers have always been quite good. The Geforce FX 5700 Personal Cinema provides playable frame rates through all tested image quality settings. People with high quality monitors might feel compelled to raise the resolution one notch up for a more enjoyable experience. The Personal Cinema was able to provide playable frame rates at 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anistropic filtering at 1024x768 resolution without any major drops in performance.

Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights uses Bioware's "Infinity 2" engine, which uses features such as pixel shaders and environment mapping. The engine is completely configurable through Bioware's Neverwinter Nights Toolset. I created a custom Neverwinter Nights mod which pushes the game engine with heavy use of fog, dynamic lighting and pixel shaders, making it a good measure of OpenGL performance.

I used a custom module named Harrowdale, which I designed to push the Neverwinter Nights engine with heavy use of fog, lighting, pixel shaders and scripted enviroments. The maps used were City of Harrowdale and Misty Valley. I used Fraps and took three preset runs through a map spanning multiple resolutions of anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. The three results were then divided by three to reduce margin of error. Settings were set to max with shiny water enabled.

Neverwinter Nights - City of Harrowdale Results

The City of Harrowdale map becomes paticularly CPU limited on the Geforce FX 5700 Personal Cinema at lower resolutions. It's only when you turn up anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering at 1024x768 does the game start to put any kind of stress on the card.

Neverwinter Nights - Misty Valley Results

The Misty Valley map is less CPU limited than City of Harrowdale. The 5700 Personal Cinema steps up to the challenge of this map and performs admirably, offering good performance up to 1024x768 resolution with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. Neverwinter Nights isn't a fast-paced game. I was able to enjoy it with 4x anti-aliasing and 8x anisotropic filtering at 1024x768 resolution in heavy fights with high particle effects.

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