Hi,

This is a bit of a longshot, but I figured asking can't hurt

I recently bought a new videocard (ATI HD5770), and two more GB or ram (total 4GB now) in an effort to improve the performance of my games. The game I play mostly is Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.

With my old system (2GB ram and an ATI 1950 XTX or something), I had all the game settings on the lowest possible, at a resolution of something like 11xx * 800 (can't really remember, but it was between 1024*768 and 1280*960). With this, on the smallest levels, performance was just about ok. On larger levels, the performance wasn't good enough for me. I barely got 20/30 FPS which is much too low for my liking in a first person shooter.

So, I upgraded my system, but unfortunately the performance of MW2 is still pretty bad. I am using the same resolution and the only difference is that I'm using medium quality textures instead of low (although setting them to low doesn't help much either). On the largest levels, I still find I have too little frames per second.

At first I was thinking maybe the drivers weren't right or some other settings were screwing with the performance. I was also starting to think the new videocard wasn't all that much better than my old one (even though my old one is over 4 years old).

However, a few days ago I got DiRT 2 (rally racing game), and the performance on that game is simply spectacular. I can play it at Full-HD resolution (1920x1080) every setting on High. If I weren't controlling the cars I would say I was watching a full-hd live stream video.

I am completely puzzled now... What could be causing this? Is DiRT2 simply a much better made game, can it display much better graphics with similar hardware? Is MW2 such a badly made game that it can't handle 1280x960 resolution with everything on low...?


What I'm wondering is, is it possible that there is something wrong that causes MW2's performance to be much worse than other games? Or is it simply due to the difference in games? At the moment I don't have any other games installed (due to having to format to a 64-bit windows), but I should try that sometime soon so that I can compare some other games...

I just find it strange, friends with similar setups are playing MW2 on full-hd resolution with everything maxed out, just like I can play DiRT2, but I cannot get more than 30FPS in MW2 on the lowest settings...