Performance in First-Person 3D Shooters

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood

The game uses deferred rendering and does not support FSAA. Instead, it uses integrated antialiasing algorithms that use the computing resources of the GPU.

First of all we notice that ATI CrossFireX technology works correctly here: Radeon HD 4870 X2 easily takes the lead and outperforms GeForce GTX 295 with the new Catalyst driver version. However, when it comes to performance improvement obtained by switching from Windows Vista to Windows 7, things are not so simple anymore. Yes, performance does improve, and it is more obvious by AMD solutions than by Nvidia ones, which only show some change in 1280x1024 resolution. However, the gain is only 3% at best. It is definitely not the result you should be looking for after putting up with all the inconveniences of OS reinstall.

Crysis Warhead

The performance does increase here. Not dramatically, but it does. Overall the gain doesn’t exceed 3-4% and in 2560x1600 resolution Radeon HD 4870 X2 even runs a little slower in Windows 7 than in Windows Vista. There is an exception, however. In this same resolution GeForce GTX 295 started to perform 9% better, which obviously can’t be explained by a measuring error of any kind. However, there is no real practical value to that, because in reality we are talking about performance increase from 14.3 to 15.6 fps.