Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
From a popular single player shooter, we moved to an extremely popular multiplayer 3D shooter. Call of Duy 4: Modern Warfare is being hailed by some as a worthy successor to the venerable Counter Strike series. This detail modern tactical shooter makes for quite the run through on our test beds, and has been known to distract a few of our editors from actually working.
For testing, we cranked everything to high and ran through the first mission on our two selected resolutions. In what is becoming a running trend through this review, the 8800 GTX beat out the 9600 GT. Coincidentally, the performance gap between the two cards was 10 FPS on both resolutions. Bearing in mind the price of the 8800 GTX versus the price of the 9600 GT, this is fairly impressive.
The game play was of course rather smooth. Frame rates did drop a little lower in some intense scenes, with numbers posting at or just above the high 20s at the lowest point. I would say that the 9600 GT is shaping up to be a very good value minded card. However I don’t think the 9600 GT should be getting too cocky just yet; we still have one more test to complete.
Crysis
Crysis is truly the great equalizer in these reviews, and is always a good game to end testing with. This fully functional DX10 title puts almost as much stress on video hardware as the 3DMark Vantage benchmarks at the beginning. For testing, we ran the GPU timedemo on high settings at our two chosen resolution. Three runs were completed, and the average was taken of the three. No Antialiasing or Anisotropic Filtering was used in the running of these tests. You shouldn’t be surprised at this point that the 9600 GT lost to the 8800 GTX. At 1440×900 the performance dropped 9% from the 8800 GTX to the 9600 GT, which isn’t too bad. What is bad is the 20% drop at 1680×1050.
At the low frame rates posted by Crysis, this can have a drastic effect on game play. Can, and did. The game wasn’t completely unplayable, but at 1680×1050 the frame rates dropped into the teens on more than a few occasions. I had to drop the resolution from the native res of my LCD to compensate. Even at that, I would say that if you have aspirations towards playing Crysis you’ll want a far more powerful video card. But you already knew that, right? Again, this is where SLI would be a possibility given the price point of this card.
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