Date:
Tuesday , August 28, 2007
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
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Call of Juarez DX10 Performance and Image Quality

Call of Juarez enjoys a very large and noticeable visual difference in DirectX 10 versus DirectX 9. This is the first game to make us say “Wow!” at the visual quality improvements using DX10. We will explore GPU performance scaling and image quality comparisons using the 8800 Ultra, GTS, & 2900 XT.

Introduction

We are on a mission to get to the bottom of DirectX 10 performance and image quality in games that support the new API. We want to simply know what the gameplay advantages are in games and if it is worth it to upgrade to Windows Vista in order to utilize DirectX 10 in the games that offer it. We started on our DX10 journey with Lost Planet. In that evaluation we found that there were no major visual differences between DX9 and DX10. The one difference that DX10 allowed, high quality soft shadows, took such a hit in performance only the highest-end video cards could muster it. Even then the image quality improvement just wasn’t worth it. Ultimately we decided for that game it was actually best to run in DX9 mode for the best gameplay experience.

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Call of Juarez

Today we are going to explore another game that has full DirectX 10 support out of the box, Call of Juarez. Call of Juarez was developed by Techland and published by Ubisoft. Originally the game was released for Windows in the fall of 2006 in the UK sans DX10 support. It did not make its way to North America until its release in June of 2007 with full support for DX10 out of the box. The game is a first-person shooter though it borrows many elements from open ended outdoor games such as Oblivion. The game itself has a Wild West theme with a very cinematic feel.

Call of Juarez is a First Person Shooter for PC, inspired from the greatest movies of the Western genre. It is the first 'serious' and the most realistic adaptation of the genre. Developed by Techland Studio, the game draws on the major themes of the American Wild West through confrontation between the two principal emblematic characters.

Gameplay is what makes a game and this game has it. This game also has some of the most immersive visuals I’ve seen in a game yet with fantastic DX10 HDR image rendering. As mentioned this game supports DX9 and DX10 out of the box. If you are running Windows Vista you have the option to play in either mode.

Call of Juarez utilizes the ChromeEngine developed by Techland which is also used in the games “GTI Racing” and “Xpand Rally Xtreme.” Visual improvements of the DirectX 10 mode versus DirectX 9 include denser vegetation, more particles, longer draw distances, higher resolution terrain and more complex scenes. In DirectX 10 mode the geometry shader supported in DX10 GPUs is used to render grass and particles. New materials are also being used in DirectX 10 mode including relief mapping, more accurate bump mapping, and specular and soft-edged foliage. High dynamic range correct multisample antialiasing is also used in DX10 mode. All of these features are supported on both ATI and NVIDIA hardware with the latest drivers and game patch. You will want to make sure to download and install patch version 1.1.1.0. This new patch adds optimizations and fixes to the game.

All Hype? No Way!

You may have heard a lot of hype surrounding this game, specifically with AMD holding this game as their trump card to show off DX10 image quality and performance on the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Actually AMD did a terrible job of presenting this game to us as a DX10 showpiece and rather just focused on the benchmark feature. We did not specifically understand that the features that had been repeatedly shown to us in their canned benchmark/demo actually existed in the game, but they do. We honestly thought that the DX10 features were a “tech demo only” feature. With the patch mentioned above the scripted DX10 “benchmark” was released as part of the patch. This benchmark runs a scripted run-through of various effects in the game, but lacks any interaction with characters. It is this benchmark that has received the brunt of the “press” assault.

We did try this benchmark ourselves and found out that performance in the benchmark is actually less than what you really get in-game when playing it. The performance indicated from the results of the benchmark run-through do not match up with what we experienced in the real game. Usually it is the other way around; benchmarks showing inflated FPS scores or quality settings. We do not recommend you use the DX10 CoJ benchmark mode as a gauge for performance comparisons. We have played through every single level of this game and have chosen an area to show you real gameplay performance comparisons encompassing every aspect of gameplay this game has to offer.

Apples to Apples

Similar to Lost Planet we will be running apples-to-apples testing. We are going to keep the in-game quality settings, resolution, and AA/AF at the same levels and compare in an “Apples-to-Apples” manor. This is being done so that we can see how GPU performance scales. Then we will compare the highest-playable settings with an included table of all the video cards tested here comparing DX9 and DX10 performance. We will then dive into image quality comparisons. And we have lots of them.