Benchmarks: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Dirt 2

To test Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 we used Fraps. We have changed the test scenario to the Hummer scene in "ACT I - Team Player" where your unit comes under fire traveling though the city. Best visual quality settings were used with 4xAA on a 60 second gameplay recording.

The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 test doesn't allow SLI to provide the big performance gains we have seen on previous tests. Adding a second GTX 460 graphics card only provided a 38% performance boost at 1920x1200 which was a bit disappointing. As a result the GeForce GTX 460 SLI configuration was 4% slower than a single GeForce GTX 480 graphics card. Despite the loss we still consider this a positive result for the SLI cards.

When compared to the ATI cards the GeForce GTX 460 SLI configuration was 23% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and 23% slower than the Radeon HD 5970. In terms of value these are still very favorable results.

Dirt 2 Benchmarks

Dirt 2 has a fantastic built-in benchmark tool that measures gameplay performance very accurately. Therefore we put down Fraps for this title and used that instead. The game was run in DirectX 11 mode with 4xAA enabled and the best possible visual settings.

When testing with Dirt 2 the SLI efficiency is greatly improved as we see a 71% performance improvement when going from a single GeForce GTX 460 graphics card to a pair of them. The combination of excellent scalability with SLI and favorable results for Nvidia cards in Dirt 2 lead to some very interesting results at 1920x1200.

Here the GeForce GTX 460 SLI configuration was 19% faster than the GeForce GTX 480, a whopping 54% faster than the Radeon HD 5870 and 8% faster than the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970. These are quite incredible results. However we also found that when overclocking the pair of GeForce GTX 460 SLI graphics cards they performed within 9fps of the GeForce GTX 480 SLI configuration.