Call of Juarez

We mentioned earlier that up until a couple of days ago we would have said Oblivion was the most graphically impressive game in our testing suite. The reason is because we got Call of Juarez in a couple of days ago. When you bump up all the settings to maximum in this game, it just looks amazing. Call of Juarez also sports the best implementation of DirectX 10 to date. There was a Call of Juarez DirectX 10 benchmark released for free use a little while back that has been received with mixed feelings around the web. Many people feel that the increase in graphical prowess of the game in DirectX 10 mode does not make up for the massive performance hit that is experienced using the new API. The magnitude of these performance hits, and our opinions on DirectX10 will be relayed to you very shortly. We chose to run a custom demo that we recorded on the “train1” level for testing the game in DirectX 9.



As you can see, even the Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2900XT 1024MB cards in CrossFire mode have a hard time with this game. We suspect that a lot of this has to do with the foliage that is prevalent throughout the game, as it is probably the best-looking plant life we have seen in any DX9 title. Shadows in the game are also pretty intense, with actual object-based shadows instead of just some dark blobs on the ground where shadows are supposed to go. Enabling CrossFire yields some pretty impressive results as well, especially at higher resolutions. This sums up our testing under Windows XP and DirectX 9. Now let’s jump over to Vista and see what these cards have to say about DirectX 10.

Vista Gaming Performance
3DMark06

Although its obviously not a game, and thusly probably should not be included in a section called “Vista Gaming Performance”, it is still a useful tool for determining general system performance and getting a quick idea of what you can expect from any given system configuration, as mentioned earlier.



You can see here that 3DMark06 scores under Vista are significantly less than under XP. This is consistent with what everyone has been seeing with Vista. Most attribute this performance drop with the increased overhead required by Vista, as well as the inadequacy of current Vista drivers from both manufacturers. However, having worked quite extensively with the latest drivers from both companies in Windows Vista, I can tell you definitively that ATI/AMD’s Catalyst driver is on a completely different level than NVIDIA’s ForceWare driver. The install process itself is more refined in Vista than it is in XP, and the performance hits sustained by ATI cards when switching between the operating systems is far less dramatic than that of NVIDIA cards. Being that the issue under discussion is drivers, which are software, they can be updated fairly easy at any time so talking about anything other than current versions is kind of meaningless. Now let’s move on to some real gaming tests.