Testbed and Methods

To investigate the performance of contemporary graphics accelerators in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood we put together the following testbed:

• Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition processor (3.2 GHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI);  
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-Extreme mainboard (Intel X58 chipset)
• Corsair XMS3-12800C9 (3 x 2 GB, 1333 MHz, 9-9-9-24, 2T);
• Maxtor MaXLine III 7B250S0 HDD (250 GB, Serial ATA-150, 16 MB buffer);
• Enermax Galaxy DXX EGX1000EWL 1000 W power supply;
• Dell 3007WFP monitor (30", 2560x1600 @ 60 Hz max display resolution);
• Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP2 64-bit;
• ATI Catalyst 9.6 for ATI Radeon HD;
• Nvidia GeForce 186.18 WHQL for Nvidia GeForce.

The graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default. We enabled transparent texture antialiasing. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:

ATI Catalyst:

• Smoothvision HD: Anti-Aliasing: Use application settings/Box Filter
• Catalyst A.I.: Standard
• Mipmap Detail Level: High Quality
• Wait for vertical refresh: Always Off
• Enable Adaptive Anti-Aliasing: On/Quality
• Other settings: default

Nvidia GeForce:

• Texture filtering – Quality: High quality
• Texture filtering – Trilinear optimization: Off
• Texture filtering – Anisotropic sample optimization: Off
• Threaded optimization: Auto
• Vertical sync: Force off
• Antialiasing - Gamma correction: On
• Antialiasing - Transparency: Multisampling
• Multi-GPU performance mode: NVIDIA recommended
• Multi-display mixed-GPU acceleration: Multiple display performance mode
• Set PhysX GPU acceleration: Enabled
• Ambient Occlusion: Off
• Other settings: default

15 different graphics cards and multi-GPU systems participated in our today’s performance test session. They can be split in three categories according to their price:

Premium/High-End category:

• ATI Radeon HD 4870 3-way CrossFire
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2
• ATI Radeon HD 4890 
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 295
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 SLI
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 285

Performance-Mainstream category:

• ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
• ATI Radeon HD 4850
• ATI Radeon HD 4770
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 275
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 Core 216

Mainstream category:

• ATI Radeon HD 4770
• ATI Radeon HD 4670
• Nvidia GeForce GTS 250
• Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT
• Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT

We ran the tests in all resolutions including 2560x1600 only for the Premium category. Performance-Mainstream was limited by 1920x1200. Mainstream solutions were tested in 1680x1050 maximum resolution.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood has extensive list of fine tuning options that look as follows:

We decided not to use any non-standard settings combinations and will only test in existing profiles that can be set in a click of a mouse. We chose Best Quality profile, which provides the highest image quality. Since the game has no built-in benchmarking tools, we used Fraps utility version 2.9.8 in the manual mode to record the average and minimal fps rate. To minimize the measuring error, we took the average result of three combined runs for further analysis.