Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
We tested Call of Duty 4 by recording a custom demo of a multiplayer gaming session and playing it back using the game's timedemo capability. We enabled 4X antialiasing and 16X anisotropic filtering and turned up the game's texture and image quality settings to their limits.

Nvidia's GeForce 9600 GT and GeForce 8800 GT reign supreme in our performance-per-dollar rankings for Call of Duty 4, and our scatter plot shows they're far and away better deals than anything in the same price range.

Interestingly, the plot also shows an almost-linear progression of prices and frame rates, and we don't really see a cut-off point after which prices spike and performance stagnates like on our CPU charts.

Looking past the GeForce 9600 GT and 8800 GT, AMD's Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 CrossFire configurations seem to offer the best performance in the $300-400 range, followed by Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2 in the $500-600 range. We should note that the SLI configurations with the GeForce 9600 GT and 8800 GT perform abnormally poorly at Call of Duty 4 at this particular resolution, a problem Nvidia could solve in future drivers. If that happens, we'd wager that dual 9600 GTs or 8800 GTs would be a better value proposition than the 3850 and 3870 CrossFire offerings—and possibly than the GeForce 9800 GX2.