Call of Duty has without a doubt gone from a good franchise on the PC to hitting the absolute mainstream with the success of Call of Duty 4, up there with Halo 3 in sales and awareness. Activision seems to be milking the franchise yearly as well as they tend to do with all their franchises and so far at least it hasn't suffered greatly although Treyarch usually isn't up there with Infinity Ward. Call of Duty: World at War, the follow-up to Call of Duty 4, hits two weeks from now but a multiplayer PC beta was released today. We as usual decided to test it on a range of video cards to see how the latest in the series performs.

Our test system was Windows Vista Home Ultimate  SP1 32-bit we used FRAPS on the Makin multiplayer map, running the same path without any other players to have accurate and repeatable results. Catalyst drivers 8.10 were used and the beta 180.43 Forceware drivers.

Graphic settings set to their highest possible settings in all categories except anti-aliasing which was left at 4X.

There are some definite conclusions we can draw from these early scores. First of all, it looks like this build of the Call of Duty engine is not yet optimized for ATI's graphic cards. Some might recall that originally a while back AMD's Radeon cards struggled with Call of Duty 4 until a better driver release came out. The Radeon 4850 definitely should not be below a GeForce 8800 GT even if it is overclocked. Unfortunately, all of our Nvidia cards are but at most that yields 8-10% gains. The benchmarks are very accurate and it isn't surprising to see that the game isn't fully optimized yet on ATI's front. Call of Duty 4 is one of the games where AMD cards currently excel, whether the 3850 or 4870X2 but here we see the 4870X2 barely stop a GeForce GTX 280. We wonder whether there is Crossfire support in this build of the game yet as well which so far we doubt.

Conclusion:

We'll do more testing tomorrow with some older and not as high-end cards but for now enjoy these. Nvidia is definitely in the driver's seat now with Call of Duty: World at War which could be because of the Big Bang II beta drivers we used or it could be that simply ATI has not yet optimized for Call of Duty: World at War as they had not with Call of Duty 4 at launch. We believe that to be the case and hopefully the 8.11 drivers have some better performance for what is sure to be a popular first-person shooter.