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Call of Duty

The Quake 3 engine is archaic by today's gaming standards, being superseded by the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 engines, but it still powers many popular games, such as Call of Duty, Jedi Knight 2, and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. These games push this engine far beyond what we originally saw with Q3A.

The Gigabyte 6800 throws us some very impressive numbers in Call of Duty, even at 1600x1200, pulling ahead of every other card by a sizable margin. The 9800XT just gets a plain kick in the pants. Going from 1024x768 to the aforementioned resolution yields a decrease that is lower than we would have expected, which seems to indicate that this benchmark is more CPU bound when AA/AF are not in use. The story changes under 4xAA/8xAF, however. The 6800 leaves the competition literally in the dust at 1024x768, and then increases that lead by another mile by pulling in over twice the framerate than the tightly-knit group behind it at 1280x1024. When 1600x1200 comes around, the 6800 hits a brick wall. Performance declines so severely that it is then on-par with the 6600 GT, and the 9800 XT manages to beat both the two NVIDIA cards by about 5 FPS, due to its 256 MB of memory. For users looking to play at high resolutions with AA/AF, it is recommended that they look carefully at a 256MB card.

Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Academy

The 6800 gives the other competitors a run for their money, and pulls in an impressive showing even at 1600x1200 with 4xAA/8xAF. Under those AA/AF settings, the Gigabyte 6800 consistently manages to beat both the 6600GT and the 9800XT in all resolutions on DM_TASPIR, with an average margin of 25 FPS over the 6600GT. That margin is lower for non-AA/AF settings, but it is still there for all resolutions.

Taking all of these results into account, it is reasonable to deduce that Call of Duty is a much more CPU-bound benchmark than is Jedi Knight 2. Scaling of scores as we went up the resolution ladder was fairly linear on all of our video cards in JK2, while in CoD the 6800 seemed to flatten out slightly. When we turned on the AA and AF, it got shot down at 1600x1200.

All in all, the Gigabyte GeForce 6800 is definitely sufficient for these two games, as long as you don't crank up the resolution too high while keeping AA/AF settings at a maximum. The sixty frames per second at 1600x1200/4xAA/8xAF in JK2 is definitely playable, but that could very possibly drop to unplayable frame rates in heavy firefights. Nevertheless, an impressive showing.