Technical analysis

Like most games built on Unreal Engine 3 hitherto, Medal of Honor: Airborne imposes fairly steep system requirements for your PC. Most notably, your video card has to be fairly new and powerful, with support for Shader Model 3. If your system meets the minimum requirements, there is a setup utility that will suggest a set of suitable graphics options, and lets you tweak them. A minimum system with an Get it! Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processor and an Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT graphics card gave these default graphics settings:

800x600 resolution
Texture detail: Medium
Model detail: Low
Decals: High
Post Processing Effects: Off

With these settings, the game was marginally playable. Frame rates were around 20-35 when there was nothing going on, but dipped to the low teens during firefights and when new textures were loaded, which happens quite often because of the paradrops and quickly changing locations. However, at 800x600 the game looks ugly, with objects lacking detail at anything longer than touching distance, and jagged edges that look like they're from 1999. Bumping the resolution up to the common 1280x1024 setting dropped the frame rate below ten, and the game became completely unplayable.

Low graphics settings with post processing turned off

Medium graphics settings, simple post processing. Water reflections and better lighting effects make a big difference in the game's atmosphere

High graphics settings with full post processing. Dynamic lighting and better texturing improves visuals further, with lots of bullet holes bearing testament to fierce fighting thanks to the high decals setting

EA doesn't provide a recommended system configuration for MoH:A, only recommending a faster processor (3.6 GHz P4 as opposed to 2.8 GHz, or AMD equivalent) to players who want to host online multiplayer matches. We found that the processor isn't a bottleneck in most modern systems, at least for playing the single player campaign; if you have any dual-core processor, hosting multiplayer matches won't pose a problem. However, to really enjoy either the campaign or multiplayer games, you need a considerably faster graphics card than the publisher requires. To attain good frame rates at 1280x1024 with low to medium graphics settings and post processing, an ATI Radeon X1650 or X1800 / NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, 7600 GT or 8600 GT will do the trick. For full eye candy at this resolution including post processing, you will need an Get it! ATI Radeon X1900 / Get it! NVIDIA GeForce 7900 series card.

Disabling post processing gives a much better frame rate on low-end graphics cards, but at the cost of much of the game's cinematic feel: the single-player experience was much less immersive without motion blur when landing, sprinting, turning quickly or getting shot. You'll also lose out on some of the impressive explosion effects, including the particle effects of the explosions themselves as well as the "shell shock" effect from being too close to an explosion.

High dynamic range is used beautifully to show the difference in brightness between a bunker and the outdoors in Normandy

Motion blur makes it harder to distinguish friend from foe in the hectic battles among the ruins of Nijmegen, but adds tons of weight to the atmosphere

A glaring lack in Unreal Engine 3 games so far, including MoH:A, is the lack of anti-aliasing graphics options. If you want to enable anti-aliasing, you'll have to force it on using your display card's drivers, and at the time of writing that produced mixed results with different display cards in MoH:A. The lack of anti-aliasing is more of an issue when playing on low resolutions, and if you play at 1600x1200 resolution or above, you'll enjoy smoother edges and more realistic visuals even without anti-aliasing. Owners of either console version won't, unfortunately, have that option.

Owners of dual graphics card systems will be disappointed to know that MoH:A currently doesn't support ATI CrossFire or NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technologies.