Big GPU Shootout – Revisited

by apoppin · June 26, 2009

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:

Let’s look at 1440×900:

Call of Juarez has no surprises. It really takes multi-GPU to play this game fully maxed out. The HD 4890 beats the HD 4870 significantly and the HD 4870-X2’s frame rates are completely satisfactory at 1920×1200 with completely maxed out details and with 4xAA/16xAF applied. The GTX 280 is generally slower than the HD 4870 and the HD 4890 and they struggle with the minimums even at 1680×1050. The HD 4870-X2 is consistently beaten by HD 4890 Crossfire and Tri-Fire wins out over everything else. We also see it takes at least an HD 4870-X2 to get the minimums out of the teens and 20s, the domain of the single card.

Even at our lowest resolution tested, the HD 2900 XT is not really playable and although 9800 GT is faster, with 8800 GTX beating it handily and with GTS 250 leading the midrange pack, you would have to eliminate AA/AF and turn down details to get satisfactory framerates with these older/midrange video cards.