Final Thoughts
Folks looking to enjoy Medal of Honor on high quality settings at a mild resolution such as 1680x1050 can get by with affordable mid-range graphics cards like the Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTS 450. We were surprised at how well previous generation graphics cards handled this game, particularly those belonging to the GeForce GTX 200 series. The two-year-old GTX 260 averaged a healthy 62fps at 1920x1200 using the highest available visual settings.
As pointed out before, we tried to enable anti-aliasing but it was very buggy on either AMD or Nvidia graphics cards, so it's yet unclear what level of performance hit this will carry when it becomes functional.
Gamers wanting to experience Medal of Honor on high quality across multiple screens or at extreme resolutions such as 2560x1600 will require a top-end card such as the Radeon HD 5870 or preferably the GeForce GTX 480, which delivered 18% better performance.
Medal of Honor is highly optimized for quad-core processors. We observed significant gains when going from two to four processing cores, whereas frequency clock and architecture mattered very little.
This was evidenced when looking at the results of the Core i7 920 and Athlon II X4 645, which delivered roughly the same performance when paired with the GeForce GTX 480. Meanwhile, the Athlon II X4 645's dual-core equivalent (Athlon II X2 260) was a whopping 43% slower.
Having that said, dual-core chips should suffice for the masses as suggested by the developer's system requirements but anyone looking to get the best possible performance out of Medal of Honor will definitely want a quad-core processor.
Editor's Note: The multiplayer portion of Medal of Honor relies on DICE's Frostbite engine, also used in Battlefield: Bad Company 2. You can check out our GPU performance review for that game here.