In its unrelenting quest for dominance in the overly crowded WWII shooter genre, Call of Duty 2 introduces a new graphics engine based on DirectX 9. The new engine features lighting and smoke effects that will wow you with their fantastic looks, and make you whimper at their ability to make your gaming rig feel like an antiquated pile of junk.
We tested out all the in-game settings, scores of video cards, numerous processors, and multiple memory settings to find out where the frame rate pileup occurs. The answer, it turned out, was simple. The game demands a state-of-the-art video card. Unfortunately, even the newest generation of graphics processors don't offer enough performance to satisfy this game.
Call of Duty 2 comes with built-in benchmarking software, but we chose to manually run a FRAPS test on the beginning of one of the later Russia levels. Our test focused on the snow effects, combined with smoke grenades and computer combatants, to get a consistent score.
Guide Sections
Call of Duty 2 will demolish any system put in its path. Short of scaling back graphical detail, you cannot mitigate frame rate loss even if you have the best hardware. We divided our feature into four sections to help you determine what you need to improve your gaming experience.
Game Settings
You're going to have to give up some eye candy if you want to run Call of Duty 2 with smooth-as-butter frame rates. While there are very few graphic settings that will greatly change how the game looks and feels, we have documented which ones affect gameplay the most.
Graphics
To say that Call of Duty 2 doesn't play nice with graphics cards is an understatement. Anything older than a Radeon X700 Pro will likely render the game basically unplayable. We'll show you the differences between the video cards by throwing 14 different cards at the game.
CPU
Holding everything else constant, we ran our Athlon 64 FX-57 at 2.8GHz and then throttled it all the way down to 1.6GHz to see how CPU speed affected frame rates.
Memory
We threw the game up against various memory sizes starting at 256MB all the way through to 2GB to see what effect RAM has on the game.
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