Introduction

One of the more popular games online right now is Call of Duty. Although it is based on the venerable Quake 3 engine, Call of Duty has enough add-ons and enhancements to the graphics engine that it can get pretty system intensive. We explore some of the settings in both the Call of Duty menu as well as changing some settings that are not directly exposed in the options. Let's see what we can do to help keep the frames per second up during a frag session! You want performance? This guide will help you tweak the highest performance out of this game!

Why is this important?

With our bare minimum configuration with a P4 2.8 with 512MB of memory where all the options are turned off, we get 143 FPS. With all the graphics options turned on, we get 84.4 FPS (even ess if we choose EAX as the sound option). This is roughly a 70% difference in framerate. While this may not be important to the gamer getting triple digit framerates, for users with lower end cards a 70% difference could mean a virtually unplayable game as compared to something that is enjoyable. This means some of the tweaking may not be as applicable to the user with a higher end system but the guide will definitely help those who are still running a GF4/8500 to squeeze a few more FPS out of CoD. We will take a look at what effect different settings have on framerates and how to maximize FPS to suit both playability and eye candy for the end user.