ATI versus nVidia — DirectX 10 Benchmarking

Benchmarking & Conclusion

Call of Juarez is an epic adventure western themed FPS game. The game’s plot is located in 19th century Wild West, with the player taking the roles of Billy, a sneaking fugitive, and the reverend Ray, the uncompromising bounty hunter on his trail. Fast paced revolver duels using historically accurate firearms, horseback riding and stealth action in memorable locations set after Western movies. The DirectX 10 Demo Version was used to bechmark both the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX video cards with the two most recent drivers for each card. The settings for the benchmarking can be seen above!

UPDATE 5-16-2007: Due to popular demand to include a GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB video card I have updated the benchmark results with an 8800 GTS!!! I was able to get BFG Technologies to overnight mail me one, so now I have one to benchmark. Enjoy! I also took the time to benchmark on the new nvidia 158.43 driver and it seemed to improve CoJ performance on the GeForce 8800 GTS a bit. The difference between the Forceware version 158.42 and 158.43 was not significant though on either NVIDIA card.

The only playable resolution was at 1024×768 with no AA enabled. The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX with the just released Vista 158.42 drivers was able to take the performance lead and beat out the ATI HD 2900 XT by a small margin. The differences between the NVIDIA 158.18 and 158.42 drivers was significant as they managed to pull off a 20% performance boost by the driver update. The update took NVIDIA from losing this test by ten percent to actually winning it by ten percent!

Updated Benchmarks:

With the resolution cranked up to 1600 x 1200 the tables were turned and the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT was able to take the lead over the more expensive GeForce 8800 GTX by less than two frames per second. Keep in mind our previous comments back in the image quality section about the use of a filter though!

Final Thoughts and Conclusions:

Overall I’m not impressed by the numbers that we are seeing with the video cards on the first benchmark for DirectX 10 video games. Call of Jaurez looks impressive, but it’s doesn’t seem like a video game that runs at ~33 FPS at 1024×768 with no Anti-Aliasing enabled! Even at 1024×768 the benchmark seems to skip around a bit on what many would consider a decent high end system.

When it comes to image quality I think that the screenshots speak for themselves and if ATI or NVIDIA want to comment about our findings and thoughts I would be more than happy to post them up for all to see. What started out as a benchmark that was sure to destroy NVIDIA and praise ATI actually showed that NVIDIA had better image quality and performed better at lower (playable) resolutions. Oh Snap! That didn’t go as planned I wouldn’t think. Have any thoughts, anger or general ramblings on the whole situation? If you do head on over to the forums and voice your thoughts, so we can know what our readers care about. The forums our free to sign up and particpiate in, so you have no excuse!

Update: For more DirectX 10 benchmark results check out our analysis of Lost Planet by Capcom!