AMD Value Platform Analysis Part 2: The Performance

Call of Juarez

Call of Juarez is one of the earliest DirectX10 games from the Polish developer Techland. It is a First Person Shooter set in the Wild West, loosely based on a number of Western movie hits which were popular in the sixties and early seventies. Call of Juarez uses the Chrome Engine which utilizes modern game programming technologies and techniques such as  High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering, Support for all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques including normal mapping, relief mapping, self-shadowing using ambient occlusion, subsurface scattering simulating diffusion and diffraction of rays finding their way through translucent objects; realistic water surfaces based on dynamic liquid system, real time HDR reflections and refraction, fading underwater visibility based on distance.

We used the benchmark tool that is added to the game with the patch 1.1.1.0. Since this game is very tough on even high end video cards, a HD 4650 was not able to play it smoothly at 1280×1024 with the highest settings. So we have split the settings into a “Best Playable” and “Highest Quality” at 1280×1024 resolution. In the “Best Playable” setting we have tried to achieve an average framerate of 25.

Here are the “Best Playable” Settings:

Next up is the “Highest Settings” category.

A HD 4770 represents the sweet spot in this game if you want to play it smoothly with maximum details. An alternate would be the HD 4850 which should give you about the same performance.

Let’s take a look at the benchmark running with the same max settings, but now running at 1920×1200:

Shown below is the screenshot from Rivatuner showing the CPU and GPU usage with the benchmark running on the HD 4650 Stock Configuration on “Best Playable” settings.

The videos below show the overclocked HD 4650 configuration running the benchmark in “Best Playable” settings. Youtube’s HD stream is 720p 2Mbps, while the Blip stream is 1080p 6Mbps high quality.