X-bit labs

The Mass Market Warrior: ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 Review (page 8)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 09/28/2007 | 10:56 PM ]

Call of Juarez

From a technical standpoint, Call of Juarez uses a more advanced engine that does not depend much of the texturing speed but focuses on the GPU’s computing capabilities instead. Moreover, this game employs HDR but doesn’t support FSAA.

It’s the opposite of what we’ve seen in Battlefield 2142: the Radeon HD 2600 XT is confidently ahead of the GeForce 8600 GT as well as GeForce 8600 GTS and, despite having fewer TMUs and ROPs, rivals the Radeon X1950 Pro.

There is, however, no difference for the gamer: the average speed of 24fps with slowdowns to 15fps doesn’t allow playing normally, especially when everything depends on your shooting accuracy. The game needs a more advanced graphics card like a Radeon HD 2900 XT for example.

Call of Juarez DirectX 10

We have already used the Call of Juarez DirectX 10 tech demo in our earlier tests.

You can see that the computing power is critical for the new-generation DirectX API: the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 is twice as fast as the Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS.

But we have to face the truth: mainstream graphics cards are not fast enough for this application. The victory of the AMD card has no practical value. It is only an indication of the efficiency of the new ATI Radeon architecture.