Call of Juarez (2006) - retro test GPU

BASIC GAME INFORMATION

 

Year of construction: 2006
Genre: Action (Shooter), 3D, 1st Person
developer: Techland
Publishing house: Ubisoft Entertainment

Gold. Precious yellow metal caresses your fingers, casts sparkling reflections and calls - passionately, leaving no chance of retreat. You can kill for gold, you can betray, you can pledge your soul to the devil himself. There are those who believe that gold is almost happiness.

A happiness that many are ready to pursue, including a young fugitive accused of murder and an old bounty hunter who fervently believes that the Lord himself made him an instrument of his divine wrath. Do you want to know what happens to those who succumb to the call of gold? 

THE GRAFICAL PART

This subsection of our review highlights the main graphical aspects of this game. Particular attention is paid to the version of the graphics engine used, the version of the API used, graphic settings and the quality of development of the main visual aspects.

Supported OS and graphics API

Call of Juarez is supported by major operating systems Windows, which includes Windows 2000/XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Other operating systems are not currently supported by developers and will not be supported. 

 

The priority and main graphics API for Call of Juarez is DirectX 10. 

Game engine

The Chrome Engine game engine is a product of Techland's own development. The first version of the engine was developed in 2003 for use in Techland's own fantasy 3D first-person shooter "Chrome". Later, the engine was successfully used by the company in games of other genres, not limited to shooters. "Chrome Engine" is constantly being improved and refined by the developer company. There are currently six versions of the game engine.

The graphics engine (renderer) is the main part of the Chrome Engine, responsible for displaying all game graphics. Initially, the Chrome Engine was PC-exclusive, but the latest versions have already been developed to support the current generation of gaming consoles - Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. On PCs, the engine supports image output using DirectX versions 8-10.

Working with locations and objects:

-Static and dynamic detection of visible surfaces using manually configurable occluders and portals.
-Advanced resource management system that allows rational use of data processing by the GPU.
-A complex material system that allows you to easily use various scripts for materials in the MaterialEditor utility, available for game developers on the Chrome engine.
-Supports per-pixel lighting using normal mapping, bump mapping, parallax mapping, environmental mapping or custom Phong shading.
-A system of access levels that allows you to modify all visual aspects of processed objects, a system of access levels for decals.
-Support for levels of detail for landscapes and objects.
-Highly optimized geometry rendering in open spaces, enhanced by polygon reduction in models or geomipmapping and polygon reduction.
-Procedural vegetation and meshes that allow you to create landscapes, grass and bushes or rocks with mountain cliffs.
-A flexible road system that allows you to create paths for moving objects, roads, streams or rivers of varying complexity. Using this feature, it is possible to create large locations, such as a city, with simulating the movement of pedestrians and cars, similar to the Grand Theft Auto series of games.

Effects and lighting:

-Post-effects manager: 64-bit HDR rendering, depth of field, tone mapping, edge antialiasing, gamma correction, motion blur, bloom, glow, ambient occlusion. Support for some effects was added in the third version of the engine (Chrome Engine 3).
-Advanced dynamic soft lighting techniques, including the shadow mapping method, dynamic shadows from all scene objects, shadow output filtering.
-Advanced particle system, customizable in the Visual FxEditor utility. With this function you can create various environmental effects: city dust caused by wind, fog, solar refractions, rain, water surfaces or fire extended to objects subject to combustion (specified in the properties).
-Animation
-Skeleton animation of characters, supporting complex skeletons, morphing effects, playing multi-structure animation with various physical parameters of the object. Complex facial expressions. The ability to make moving heads and eyes of characters observing the movement of objects on the stage, for example, the actions of the player.

Physics engine

The physics engine integrated into Chrome is based on the open source Open Dynamics Engine, a freely distributed software packaged as a plug-in library. Supports solid state physics, basic physics with predefined interaction paths. Supports player actions with various objects “lying” on the level, partially destructible environment, rag doll physics for simulating death, vehicle physics, fabric physics for clothing animation, sound effects for interacting with objects, level of physics detail (allows you to customize the degree of interaction with objects , from minimal to most complex, to save resources). 

Advanced Game Settings

Call of Juarez has a wide range of graphic settings. You can also change the settings for three main sub-items - low medium and high.

 

Below we have provided screenshots of the game at various graphics settings, where our readers can see the difference between the minimum, medium and maximum graphics quality settings. 

Various quality modes

We see the greatest difference when moving from none to medium settings. When moving from medium to high, the changes are less noticeable.

Comparison of FullHD and 4K

Call of Juarez looks quite colorful in 4K...

Comparison of anti-aliasing modes

Activating full-screen anti-aliasing completely eliminates all surface irregularities.

General visual design and game physics

Call of Juarez was the most technologically advanced project in its time period. In addition to the excellent graphics and incredible gaming atmosphere, the game also showed the incredible system requirements for graphics solutions of that time.

 

So, released on time, having only support for DirectX 9, the game ranked top of the time even at a resolution of 1024x768. The situation repeated itself with video cards supporting DirectX 10, when a patch was released for the game with support for this API. It is noteworthy that this game is one of the most technologically advanced and beautiful games from the Techland studio - then all their subsequent games had simplified graphics due to multiplatform. 

 

Next, we will move directly to gaming tests and determine what impact this game has on modern computer hardware. 

TEST PART

Test GPU

All video cards were tested at maximum graphics quality using MSI Afterburner. The purpose of the test is to determine how video cards from different manufacturers behave under the same conditions. The average and minimum FPS were taken as performance indicators. Below is a video of the test segment:   

Our video cards were tested at separate screen resolutions of 1920x1080, 2560x1600 and 3840x2160 at maximum graphics quality settings allowed by Call of Juarez. SLI and AMD CrossFireX are sufficiently supported by the game, showing excellent scalability. The game has an internal benchmark, but since its maximum resolution is limited to 1920x1200, it was decided to conduct the test in the game itself.

Testing at resolution 1920x1080

     

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

  

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6850 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti level. The optimal solutions will be  Radeon R9 270 or GeForce GTX 660.

Testing at 2560x1600 resolution

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 2560x1600

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon HD 6870 or GeForce GTX 650 Ti level. The optimal solutions will be  Radeon HD 6990 or GeForce GTX 590.

Testing at resolution 3840x2160

 

Testing at maximum quality settings 3840x2560

 

With these settings An acceptable FPS indicator was shown by video cards of the Radeon R9 270 or GeForce GTX 660 level. The optimal solutions will be ARES II or GeForce GTX 780 SLI.

Testing of video memory consumed by the game was carried out by the program MSI Afterburner. The indicator was based on results on top video cards from AMD and NVIDIA with separate screen sizes 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 with different anti-aliasing settings.

Testing at maximum memory quality settings GPU

 

The recommended amount of video memory usage for a resolution of 1920x1080 will be 768 MB of video memory, for a resolution of 2560x1600 - 1024 MB of video memory and for a resolution of 3840x2160 about 1536 MB of video memory. 

Micro-Stuttering Test

Introducing our testing of FPS output latency on a Micro-Stuttering monitor. The indicator was based on the results on multi-chip configurations of video cards from AMD and NVIDIA at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum image quality settings.

Testing at maximum Micro-Stuttering quality settings GPU 

 

Micro-Stuttering latency indicators for video cards are within normal limits.

Test CPU

    

We tested processor dependence on 15 models of basic configurations that are relevant today. The test was carried out in those places where the video card value for the game is minimal and its load was less than 99%, this time at a resolution of 1920x1080 with maximum graphics quality settings.

Testing at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 

 

At the moment, CPU performance is at a sufficient level.

Loading of processor coresat maximum quality settings 1920x1080 Intel% 

 

Loading of processor cores at maximum quality settings 1920x1080 AMD% 

 

The game can support up to 4 computing threads, which is quite good.

RAM test

The test was carried out on the basic configuration of Core i 7 3970X@4.9 GHz with 16GB DDR3 2400 MGz pre-installed memory. The entire used operational memory was taken as an indicator. The RAM test on the entire system was carried out on various test benches without launching third-party applications (browsers, etc.).

Testing the game's RAM consumption at various quality settings 

 

As we can see, with various quality settings, the amount of RAM consumed in Call of Juarez is at the level of 400 megabytes.  

Testing system RAM consumption  

 

On a 4GB system, Call of Juarez consumes about 1.5GB of RAM. In the presence of a system with 8 gigabytes, the RAM consumption of all RAM was 1.7 gigabytes. With a 16 GB system, the total memory consumption was almost 2.2 gigabytes.