Call of Duty rocks! A great update for the Quake III engine which has proven to be an excellent measurement for reviews. I used two custom timedemos (Dawnville and POW Camp maps) that Mike recently created. If you don't know much about Call of Duty then you should really check out these links (#1, #2, #3) on our site. The most recent article is our new gameplay article by Brian, our new game reviewer.

Call of Duty: Dawnville Map

You may have noticed that I attempted to overclock to 555/1050. This seemed a bit out of reach at first based on other reviews that I've read. Many of those seemed to reach a ceiling somewhere around 520/1020. However, with a few exceptions (Halo and SW:KotOR), I was able to benchmark most of the games (and both synthetics) at these lofty settings without any artifacting whatsoever.

Call of Duty: Dawnville Benchmarks

This Dawnville timedemo is taken from part of the opening level of the game and it is a good representation of the typical level of action that goes on in this game.

Call of Duty: POW Camp Map

In the image above, Rytr made the following interesting observation:

I just noticed the first person is aiming a Russian SMG(?) Should have been a BAR, Thompson, M3, German MP40, 42, or 44. Did not notice many inaccuracies in this game...just caught my eye so I thought I would mention it.

The POW Camp timedemo is taken from late in the American campaign. This timedemo is more stressing than the Dawnville timedemo and reflects the more heated action sequences.

Call of Duty: POW Camp Benchmarks

Again, I was very impressed to see how highly overclockable the Gainward card was. I ran these timedemos many times in succession and never had one lockup or anomoly. However, it is obvious that this overclocking success didn't yield any appreciable gain in performance. My CPU is the bottleneck here since this card is so fast...good news for this card's scalability with faster processors.

Next Page: Gameplay Testing - Halo Combat Evolved