CrossFire-X, eXplored

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:

Now at 1680×1050:

Call of Juarez scales amazingly linearly with GPU clockspeeds.  We see real scaling with our overclocked HD4890-XOC consistent with their overclock over the stock HIS HD4890.  The HD4890 beats the HD4870 significantly and the HD4870-X2’s frame rates are completely satisfactory at 1920×1200 with completely maxed out details and with 4xAA/16xAF applied.  The HD4870-X2 is consistently beaten by all flavors of Crossfire and Tri-Fire wins out over everything else; the HD4870-X2 paired with the HD4890 is faster than one paired with the HD4870.  We also see it takes at least a 4870-X2 to get the minimums out of the teens and 20s, the domain of the single card.