Flank left and clear those buildings!
Now we may well have seen it before but we certainly haven’t seen it rendered as well as Call Of Duty 2 does it… simply put the, if you’ve got the hardware, Call Of Duty 2 visuals will knock your khaki desert socks off. Those of you who played the demo will know what I’m talking about here though it has to be said that the demo was a serious hardware monster. The full retail version appears to have gone through some optimisation to make it run smoother and faster without making your system beg for mercy.
Click for larger imageThe biggest resource killer has to be the volumetric smoke and dust which, given the fact the game is chock full of explosions, could be a bit of a deal breaker on lower end systems. The HEXUS.gaming Test Rig. will quite happily run Call Of Duty 2 at 1280x1024 with 2xAA, 4xAF and everything else maxed. The only time I noticed any appreciable slow-down was in the darker buildings with a big fire fight going on… the game seemed to not like figuring out the dynamic lighting from so many sources at once.
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Click for larger imageInterestingly, and maddeningly, there is an ‘Optimal System Settings’ button in the game options screen. The idea behind this is to automatically set your rig up for the best possible performance… Hit this at your peril though for as ‘uber’ as your gaming rig may be, you’ll find the game just set’s itself to 800x600 and knocks all the lovely graphical trickery options to medium or low. It’s a wee bit annoying to have a pretty kick-ass rig and find the latest game reckons 800x600 is your ‘optimal’ resolution!
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Click for larger imageAnother quirk is the ‘Optimize for SLI’ option. Now I would’ve thought that the game would have detected my nice spanky 6800s sitting alongside each other, but no, it didn’t have a clue they were there. Even after following NVIDIA’s advice and installing the very latest BETA drivers which included a bug fix for Call Of Duty 2 graphics, it still had to be told I’ve got 2 green cards running in the HEXUS.gaming Test Rig. That said, there are still some graphical glitches, most notable on the second desert tank mission with models appearing as random triangles, warping in and out of existence. With the restricted view you get from the tank, this glitch made the level almost unplayable, especially when one of your objectives turns out to be the invisible warping thing you have to destroy. So it looks as though both NVIDIA and Activision need to have another look at the visuals…
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