Call of Duty 2 is the sequel to the very popular FPS Call of Duty and Activision has released a “huge” demo to the public. At AMDZone they’ve done som interesting tests with this demo and found some very interesting patterns. Their only graphic card with 512MB, Radeon X800 XL, namely used more effects at higher resolutions than Radeon X850 XT and GeForce 7800 GTX. But that was far from everything, despite that X800 XL-card offered better image quality it performed better than its two more powerful opponents. Especially Radeon X850 XT was beatn pretty badly when the settings went higher and it seems the X800XL-card’s massive memory buffert is the reason.
“After updating our benchmarks we are left with some very surprising and interesting results. It appears that finally there is a game that uses the texture memory of a 512MB card, and it seems that those without that much memory are being penalized. ATI’s X800XL 512MB card finally proves its worth and beats the X850XT PE. Not only that, but the game is automatically adjusting the level of detail based on the card unfortunately giving the more advanced user less choice and making benchmark comparisons not equally direct.”
This is a very interesting result and even if you shouldn’t read too much in to this early on there is apparently some performance to gain with having cards with a big memory buffert.
