Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
We tested Call of Duty 4 by recording a custom demo of a multiplayer gaming session and playing it back using the game's timedemo capability. We've chosen to test at display resolutions of 1280x1024, 1680x1050, and 1920x1200, which were the three most popular resolutions in our hardware survey.

We didn't go easy on the cheap cards, either—we enabled image quality enhancements like antialiasing and anisotropic filtering where appropriate. As you'll see, most of the cards handled them quite well. Because the cheapest cards can suffer quite a bit from having such things enabled, though, we did test at 1280x1024 with AA and sometimes aniso disabled, depending on the game, to coax frame rates well into playable territory on most cards.

As you can see, every single card tested except for the GeForce 9500 GT is able to crank out frames at a rate of over 60 per second in CoD4 at 1280x1024 with edge antialiasing disabled, and even the 9500 GT averages well above 30 FPS. That demonstrates why cheap video cards are somewhat interesting these days. As the display resolutions and image quality increase, the pack separates into several clear groups. The Radeon HD 4670, 3850, and the GeForce 9600 GSO bunch together, as do the Radeon HD 4850 and GeForce 9800 GTX+. The GeForce 9600 GT and 9800 GT form their own group between the other two, while the 9500 GT is alone at the back of the pack.

To give you a sense of what these numbers mean, I found the Radeon HD 4670 to be borderline playable at 1680x1050. You might be able to play through the single-player campaign at these settings, but you would probably want to dial back something—the resolution, AA, or aniso—in order to get it running quickly enough for multiplayer. Still, that's quite good for an $80 video card.