High Performance Gaming on a Budget: Athlon II vs. Phenom II vs. Q9550S

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is one of the very earliest DX10 games. Techland’s Call of Juarez is loosely based on Spaghetti Westerns that became popular in the early 1970s. Call of Juarez features its Chrome Engine using Shader Model 4 with DirectX 10. Our benchmark isn’t built into Call of Juarez, but is an official stand-alone that runs a simple flyby of a level that is created to showcase its DX10 effects. It offers good repeatability and it is a good stress test for DX10 features in graphics cards, although it is not quite the same as actual gameplay because the game logic and AI are stripped out of this demo.

Performing Call of Juarez benchmark is easy. You are presented with a simple menu to choose resolution, anti-aliasing, and two choices of shadow quality options. We set the shadow quality on “high” and the shadow map resolution to the maximum, 2048×2048. At the end of the run, the demo presents you with the minimum, maximum, and average frame rate, along with the option to quit or run the benchmark again. We always ran the benchmark at least a second time and recorded that generally higher score.

Call of Juarez DX10 benchmark at 1920×1200 with the HD 4870-X2:

Here it appears that simple clockspeed is not the biggest variable.  The dual-core Athlon II and Phenom II both get minimums in the lowest 20s whereas the 720 X3 is significantly faster with its third core and it comes within a couple of FPS of Q9550S when they are both stock clocked.

Now with our GTX 290 at 1920×1200 we see that there is not a lot of difference with any CPU at the minimum frame rates; this time the maximums belong to the Intel PC:

Now at 1680×1050 with the HD4870-X2 we note much the same trend as it was for 1920×1200 where the lower resolution does not make a lot of difference to our framerates:

Let’s look at the GTX 280 at 1680×1050:

Call of Juarez is a little strange at 1680×1050 with our GTX 280.  This time, the AMD CPUs edge out the Q9550s in the minimum by a couple of frames per second.  It really takes multi-GPU to play this game fully maxed out.  The HD 4870-X2’s frame rates are completely satisfactory at 1920×1200 with completely maxed-out details and with 4xAA/16xAF applied but only with our quad core Intel CPU and also with our AMD tri-core; the dual-core CPUs fall short.  To play Call of Juarez satisfactorily with GTX 280, you will need to lower some details and/or AA with any CPU you choose.