It's hard to believe three years have passed since Medal of Honor: Airborne was released for the PC, and even harder to accept that the original MoH: Allied Assault debuted way back in 2002. I'm sure fans of the series have long awaited this moment, but personally despite the number of entries to the MoH franchise over the years, Airborne was admittedly the first I played extensively. Don't get me wrong, it's not that previous games in the series were bad, they just failed to impress me from what I could see on the surface and as a result I was quick to pass over them.

That wasn't the case with MoH: Airborne, which I picked up solely for benchmarking purposes but then I found it difficult to pull myself away from the game. I can't recall the last time I was motivated enough to play a single player campaign from start to finish, so when I heard about the 2010 version of Medal of Honor I instantly looked into pre-ordering the game.

Developed by EA's Danger Close and DICE, this latest installment is simply titled "Medal of Honor." Meant to reboot the series, MoH takes place during the ongoing war in Afghanistan featuring both single and multiplayer modes. For the purpose of this article we are focusing on single player performance. Medal of Honor is unique in that it uses two different graphics engines for single player and multiplayer modes, so all the performance testing we are about show you will only reflect output in the single player mode.

Single player uses a heavily modified Unreal Engine 3 while the multiplayer segment was built with DICE's Frostbite. Frostbite was also used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, which we looked at earlier this year and we suspect that the hardware requirements will be very similar. Unreal Engine 3 is much older however, and probably not as demanding, so it will be interesting to see how Medal of Honor performs.