Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare is the latest game from Activision in a long-running series that is scheduled to get a 5th installment this year. The game uses DirectX 9.0c-class graphics in a modern world where the Terrorists invade Iraq and other places around the world. The game was totally playable on the GTX260 from XFX with playable frame rates throughout the game including during heavy firefights.

Crysis is the benchmark by which all video cards are measured in terms of DirectX 10 performance as the game stresses the video card like few others on the PC market today. The game played beautifully on the XFX GTX260 as the high resolution of 1680x1024 and High settings were totally playable in DirectX 10 mode. Turning on 4x AA and 16x AF caused situations where the game had slowdowns. I would suggest turning the resolution down a notch to 1680x1050 if those settings are desired. Hellgate London is a DirectX 10 game that comes from Microsoft Game Studios. This game takes place in London England after an invasion of demons caused London to become a ghost town. The game uses Pixel Shader 4.0 effects throughout and was one of the first games on the PC market to support DX10. Hellgate London plays great on the GTX 260 from XFX with DirectX 10 mode playable throughout at maximum resolution.

A special case on gaming should be made with games like Unreal Tournament that have Hardware PhysX support built into the game. The game plays well with the official driver, but enabling PhysX offloaded some of the physics onto the graphics card and improved performance up to 10% ingame compared to enabling hardware physics with the standard video card driver without PhysX support. Better performance and enhanced physics in a game are what the drivers enable.

Game screenshots