Introducing Galaxy’s GTS 450 SuperOverclock

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is one of the very earliest DX10 games. It 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 is identical to the one that is built-into the game. It 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.

Here are Call of Juarez DX10 benchmark results beginning at 1440×900.  Our method is different from our usual benching as we will start with the least demanding resolution and details and work up to more challenging work for our graphics cards.

This time the stock GTS 450 takes the lead over the HD 5750 and we notice a larger performance gap with the GTS 450 SOC. 2xAA takes a reasonable performance hit over not using it and the old 8800 GTX is clearly left in the dust by the newer video  cards.  Now on to 1650×1080 resolution:

We see the same thing as with 1440×900 except this time GTS 450 SLI stands out and gains some hefty performance in this older DX10 game.  Let’s see how it does at a higher resolution plus 2xAA and compared with two powerful and expensive single-GPU cards.

At any rate, the GTX 480 is the clear winner over HD 5870, yet we see GTX 450 SLI provide a very similar gaming experience.  Overclocking both of the GTSes in SLI would surely catch the HD 5870.