Call of Duty: Ghosts is a first person shooter video game, published by Activision and released in October 2013. Since it does not include an in-game benchmark, it perfect for more real world gaming testing. To obtain repeatable results we have used FRAPs and recorded 90 seconds of the single player ‘Ghost Stories’ level, starting as soon as we resume control of Logan back on Earth. An average of four runs was taken.
The settings used in the testing below are highest settings for quality, VSync disabled and a resolution of 2560×1440 and 1920×1080. Image Quality, Textures Resolution, Normal Map Resolution, and Specular Map Resolution set to Extra. Screen Space Ambient Occlusion and Antistrophic Filtering set to High, Terrain Detail set to ON, and Anti-Aliasing was set to TXAA 4X. With Shadows, Distortion, Motion Blue and Depth of Field set to Yes.
Call of Duty: Ghosts produced the largest gains in any game tested. The gains were large enough that the PNY 960 Elite OC actually beat a factory overclocked R9 280X at 1080P resolutions. However, once the resolution was increased PNY 960 Elite OC was unable to continue to beat it and quickly lost ground. This shows both the strengths of the Elite OC (fast core) and its biggest weakness (128-bit memory controller). If PNY had overclocked the ram we are sure that it would have come a lot closer to the R9 280X at 1440P. By the same token, the PNY 960 Elite OC is still faster than a stock R9 280X and consumers only interested in ‘team red solutions will have to spend nearly 9% more to beat this card.
