Benchmark Results: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (DirectX 9)

Call of Duty, on the other hand, is playable on the A8-3850’s Radeon HD 6550D core.

At 1680x1050, the speed-up is almost 4x compared to AMD’s previous-generation integrated graphics solution. And it’s almost 2x compared to Intel’s best effort—without anti-aliasing enabled. Apply an even more taxing load using 4x AA and AMD nearly triples Intel’s frame rate.

Because Call of Duty responds so well to platform changes, our decision to standardize on DDR3-1333 does hurt the A8-3850’s numbers a bit. However, we also have the data to show what you’d get with an upgrade to memory running at a higher data rate. You’ve already seen this graph, but here it is again:

The biggest jumps happen when you switch from DDR3-800 to DDR3-1066 and then to DDR3-1333. But there’s another sizable gain in shifting to DDR3-1600, even if it means a command rate of two (from one previously).

The move to DDR3-1866 actually turns out to be detrimental because it requires relaxing a couple of other timings, even if we’re able to maintain CAS 8. The sweet spot here is definitely DDR3-1600 at the lowest latency you can get.