Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare Notebook and Desktop Benchmarks

For the original German article, see here.

Graphics

The foundation is the IW engine, which was developed by the series founder Infinity Ward and was originally based on id Tech 3. It was lifted to a next-gen level with Advanced Warfare, but despite several optimizations and extended features over the last couple of years, you can still notice the age of the engine. The textures in particular usually cannot keep up with the razor-sharp Battlefield 1.

The lovely designed figures fall behind the rivals as well, which is also the case for the animations and effects. Most of them look bombastic in Infinite Warfare, but we would rarely call them high-quality. The developers also tend to exaggerate pretty often. When your own player is hit, the vision will blur so much that you can hardly see anything on the screen and often run blindly into disaster.

However, we have to say that there is currently no action title that could challenge Battlefield 1 in the graphics department. This includes Titanfall 2, Mafia 3, Deus Ex Mankind Divided or Far Cry Primal, all of which were launched in 2016. Not even graphics blockbusters like Doom or Rise of the Tomb Raider, which raised the bar quite a bit, can beat Battlefield 1. Compared to a typical first-person shooter, Infinite Warfare does have its graphical highlights and looks decent up to good. We especially like that the developers worked on the loading times. While you still had to wait for multiple minutes before a mission started in the predecessor, even with a Solid State Drive, the missions now start surprisingly quick even on HDDs.

In return, the shaders have to be preloaded when you launch the game for the first time or change the hardware or the system, respectively. The process, which can take up to a couple of minutes in extreme cases, can be stopped, but the game will give you a warning that the performance might be affected. You should have patience during the installation in general. The Steam version, which is used for this article, downloads around 55 GB, and Infinite Warfare will even need around 70 GB on your hard drive (Battlefield 1 "only" used 47 GB at launch).

There are some other negative things we noticed during the tests. We are not talking about the occasional graphics bugs (e. g. with smoke), but primarily the graphics menu, which – first negative aspect – does not include any presets at all. The different tabs make it easier in theory, but the handling is very uncomfortable in practice and time-consuming – even if the game has to be restarted after you changed the texture resolution. Speaking of resolution: Which developer had the idea to apply other resolutions immediately without confirming? If a monitor supports a lot of resolutions, it can feel like hours before you find the right one – including a black screen after every change.

Infinite Warfare can really convince with the number of options. The extended video menu has more than 20 settings, starting with field of view and lighting all the way up to anti-aliasing. Besides FXAA, you will also find 1X and T2X SMAA. All modes will unfortunately result in a certain blurriness, and SMAA works best. Attention tuning fans: Downsampling is supported as well. The implemented grain filter (Filmic Strength & Movie Grain) is certainly a matter of taste. We did not really like it.

One annoying issue was Infinite Warfare's enormous VRAM requirements. If the video memory of the GPU is insufficient, some settings will just be reduced during the game without asking. This was the case for the GeForce GTX 960M 2 GB VRAM and High details. Such paternalism will be a problem for many PC users – independent of the fact whether some settings do not run smoothly anyway.

Infinite Warfare does not run completely smooth in higher settings even with 3 or 4 GB VRAM though. Demanding gamers should at least have 6 GB VRAM, but the first-person shooter will only run completely without little stutters with 8 GB VRAM. Then there is also the integrated FPS lock. While the multiplayer limits at 91 frames per second, you can reach up to 125 FPS in single-player – annoying for users of 144 Hz displays.

Despite the mentioned weaknesses and limitations, the new title leaves a much more sophisticated impression compared to the very "prudish" Black Ops 3 at launch. As for the gameplay, you will get the familiar Call of Duty recipe, which is loved by some gamers because of its simplicity and hated by others because of its casual orientation.

The new version takes place in the future and offers some spectacular battles in space. The word spectacular also – as per usual for Call of Duty – fits for the staging, which consists of adrenaline filled and perfectly scripted fights in diverse levels. Thanks to the good pacing and the nice lighting effects, the whole game is very atmospheric. There are often also generous views with nice panoramic impressions.

The powerful sound and the prominent speakers do the rest to ensure the immersion into the science-fiction world. There is also quite a lot of story for a Call of Duty game. That the initial missions are directly linked to each other without time gaps does enhance the intensity even further, just like the cool cut-scenes.

However, you should not expect a brilliant narrative. In the end and similar to the majority of first-person shooters, Infinite Warfare is a very straight-forward experience where you do not have to think a lot. The bombastic experience can only somewhat compensate for the fact that Call of Duty in its core is outdated…both in terms of technology as well as gameplay.