by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko
07/19/2009 | 07:04 PM
Western theme has always been very popular. Long before PCs appeared kids were playing “cowboys and Indians” and grown-ups enjoyed Western movies. But no matter how strange it may seem, computer games in this genre are pretty rare. Game developers seem to be much fonder of the World War II theme, for instance. As for the names that are more or less known these days, I could probably only come up with the interactive shooting range called Mad Dog McCree off the top of my head. Moreover, the list of games like that is pretty short, and sometimes they even erroneously consider some jRPG games like Wild Arms to be ones of those Western themed titles. Overall, we can’t say that this market segment is oversaturated. Quite on the contrary.
Therefore back in 2006 Call of Juarez made a truly great entrance into the gaming world. While the great number of Western movies by Italian producers gave birth to a term “spaghetti-Western”, one of the best computer games of the same theme comes from the Polish Techland studio. The developers not just maintained all the matrices of genre, but also implemented really advanced graphics in their new game. This technological perfection came at a price: Call of Juarez set very serious requirements for the graphics accelerators, which got even worse in 2007 when they released a game version with DirectX 10 support. Our regular readers should know very well by now that this game could bring down the best graphics cards of those days like GeForce 8800 GTX and Radeon HD 2900 XT.
The Call of Juarez story was not very sophisticated, because it was built according to the basic matrices of genre. However, the adventures of Billy Candle and Reverend Ray McCall were presented so skillfully that the game quickly became a best seller. Unfortunately, it was not free from certain drawbacks, the main one, as I have already said, being extremely high graphics subsystem requirements, as well as obviously linear storyline masked just a little bit by the great prairies. We are not going to retell the story in detail today: if you are not familiar with it, the game is totally worth playing even despite the release year. I have to say that after finishing Call of Juarez, I had the feeling that there were some obvious omissions in the main characters’ stories, which gave me the impression that the developers had saved quite a bit “for later”.
And this “later” has finally come. On June 30, 2009 they launched Call of Juarez sequel that rapidly became one of the 10 best selling games in the USA and Canada. It was, in fact, not surprising at all, considering how popular the original game was. Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a tale of two McCall brothers, Thomas and Ray. One of them has already been introduced to you in the first part of the game first as an enemy and then as an ally. It is in fact about Reverend Ray McCall, so, Bound in Blood, is actually a prequel to the first Call of Juarez rather than sequel.
The Bound in Blood story starts very unexpectedly. Instead of some sort of introduction to the events the player gets to see both McCall brothers, Ray and Thomas, pointing their guns at each other. Almost immediately the plot switches to the Civil War site and the player who has chosen Ray McCall fighting in the Confederate army will have to repel the attack of the North forces on the trenches of the South army. Once he manages to save Thomas, they receive an order to move back towards Atlanta, but brothers ignore it because they can’t leave their home and family unprotected.
They become deserters, but once they reach their home they discover that their mother has been killed and only their younger brother William is still alive. Knowing that they will be punished for deserting the army, Ray and Thomas hit the road and take William with them.
The next scene describes events that take place a year later. They player learns that over the past year McCall brothers have been banished from numerous towns for illegal activities, that Thomas has managed to seduce sheriff’s daughter and that sheriff himself has been shot in a duel by one of the brothers. As a result, the entire town was hunting McCalls down and they decided to take off on a quest for the legendary Cortez treasure that they were hoping to use to rebuild their property and family…
This is when the real adventures start. The player will participate in gun duels, horseback chases, bank robberies, armed conflicts with local tribes, -everything that makes a good Western.
Except the very first mission, you can control any of the two brothers. Your choice of a brother determines the gameplay style, because Ray and Thomas each have their own skills. For instance, Ray boasts close-quarters combat skills, is very good with a pair of guns and explosives and even knows to use a heavy Gatling gun. Thomas is way better at long-distance duels and is a master of rifles, bows and knives throwing. Moreover, Thomas is very good at lasso, which helps him get into very hard to reach places easily. This choice will make it much more fun to play the game, which is, however, not very long – it will take a player no more than 6-8 hours of non-stop game time to finish the entire game. Luckily, the day is saved by Free World system that makes Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood somewhat similar to Fallout 3. The idea behind this system is that it keeps the player occupied between the primary missions and he gets to interact with a big world with its towns, prairies, ranchos, ruins and bandits supplying bonus tasks.
Gun duels that are an inalienable part of any Western have been implemented in Bound in Blood in a very extraordinary manner. They become an ultimate delight for some players, while for others turn into a real nightmare.
It all has to do with unusual controls: you have to keep the enemy within your visual field and at the same time hold your hand as close to the holster as possible, so that on a signal you could use the mouse to pull out the gun with one sharp move. It is pretty hard to master this technique, which makes some players very unhappy.
From the technical prospective, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is based on Chrome Engine 4. The previous version of this engine was used for the first Call of Juarez. Despite the absence of DirectX 10 support, almost all features of contemporary GPUs are there including HDR, per-pixel lighting, subsurface scattering, emulation of wet surfaces, cloth, soft shadows, etc. It doesn’t support classical multisampling because of implemented deferred rendering. However, the engine uses ALU computational capacity for edge-detect antialiasing that produces a similar effect. Gamers remember that the first part of Call of Juarez couldn’t boast too modest system requirements. Does the massive use of advanced special effects in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood give us the reason to think the same way about the second part too? Let’s try to answer this question during our practical test session.
To investigate the performance of contemporary graphics accelerators in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood we put together the following testbed:
The graphics card drivers were set up to provide the highest possible quality of texture filtering and to minimize the effect of software optimizations used by default. We enabled transparent texture antialiasing. As a result, our ATI and Nvidia driver settings looked as follows:
ATI Catalyst:
Nvidia GeForce:
15 different graphics cards and multi-GPU systems participated in our today’s performance test session. They can be split in three categories according to their price:
Premium/High-End category:
Performance-Mainstream category:
Mainstream category:
We ran the tests in all resolutions including 2560x1600 only for the Premium category. Performance-Mainstream was limited by 1920x1200. Mainstream solutions were tested in 1680x1050 maximum resolution.
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood has extensive list of fine tuning options that look as follows:
We decided not to use any non-standard settings combinations and will only test in existing profiles that can be set in a click of a mouse. We chose Best Quality profile, which provides the highest image quality. Since the game has no built-in benchmarking tools, we used Fraps utility version 2.9.8 in the manual mode to record the average and minimal fps rate. To minimize the measuring error, we took the average result of three combined runs for further analysis.
I can’t say that the game is very resource-hungry: in 2560x1600 pretty modest Radeon HD 4890 provides sufficiently high minimal and average performance for comfortable gaming experience, so it makes no sense to invest into more expensive graphics solutions. Looks like the gaming engine favors Nvidia solutions, so if you want to be a little more certain that the performance won’t drop below the acceptable minimum, then you should probably go for a GeForce GTX 285, which is about 12% ahead of the Radeon HD 4890 in average performance, and about 32% ahead – in minimal performance. Yes, GeForce GTX 295 type solutions provide even higher performance levels, but they are expensive, noisy and energy-inefficient. As for ATI solutions of similar type, they simply don’t know to use more than one graphics core in Call of Juarez at all.
So, if you have quite a bit of money at your disposal, we would recommend to get a GeForce GTX 285, but if you decide to save a bit, then Radeon HD 4890 will be just as good even if you have a 30-inch monitor.
The results obtained during the tests in Performance-Mainstream category also turned out quite good. They confirmed that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood doesn’t require a $500 graphics accelerator. If you are playing in 1920x1200 maximum resolution, you can do just fine with a Radeon HD 4770 priced at only $100. Even if this rare graphics card is not available, you can settle for a Radeon HD 4850.
The advantage of Nvidia solutions is not so obvious here, because GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 yields to Radeon HD 4870 in minimal performance. Therefore, the only argument in favor of this particular card will be lower power consumption and noise, and also performance in other games, if you decide to take into account more diverse performance aspects when choosing a graphics accelerator. However, GeForce GTX 275 has no competitors whatsoever and this solution can work in even higher resolutions that 1920x1200.
But the ultimate favorite of the Performance-Mainstream category is a modest Radeon HD 4770 that seems to be pretty confident among several much more “muscular” opponents. It has every right to take over the true people’s graphics card title from Radeon HD 4850.
Among the least expensive solutions only Radeon HD 4670 demonstrated very low results in 1680x1050. In 1280x1024 it performed fast enough, not any slower than the rest of the testing participants. Since Radeon HD 4770 costs only around $100, it was also tested within this category and demonstrated performance results close to those of a GeForce GTS 250. While its price is lower than that of the GeForce GTS 250, it is still quite rare in retail channels.
The choice in this category is absolutely definite: if you can find Radeon HD 4770 at a reasonable price, go for it. A possible alternative would be a considerably more expensive GeForce GTS 250, and if you have limited budget you can always turn to GeForce 9600 GT, because unlike Radeon HD 4670 it provides comfortable gaming performance at 1680x1050.
The results of this traditional test session revealed some typical peculiarities. First, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood doesn’t set any unrealistic requirements to the graphics subsystem. And second, the game obviously favors solutions based on Nvidia GeForce GPUs.
Now there is not so much left to check. We need to find out if the performance in this game depends on the CPU frequency and if it does, then how greatly. Besides, as usual we decided to check how the game runs with different image quality settings. To answer these questions we picked two most typical (in our opinion) representatives of the current generation of ATI and Nvidia solutions: Radeon HD 4890 and GeFo0rce GTX 275. Both cards were tested with Core i7-965 Extreme Edition and Core i7-920 processors. During this test session we used 1680x1050 resolution. With the help of Fraps 2.9.8 we recorded instantaneous speed of the cards over the period of 60 seconds for each of the three image quality profiles. Besides, we captured a few screenshots to visually evaluate the difference in image quality between the above mentioned quality profiles.
Here are the obtained results:
We didn’t detect any serious issues no matter what graphics accelerator and CPU were installed in our system. All lines on the diagrams are packed into a tight group and the only evident thing is that GeForce GTX 275 is a little faster than Radeon HD 4890, though the difference is really insignificant. In all cases average performance varied between 86-88 fps and minimal performance didn’t drop below 57 fps. This way, it doesn’t make sense to lower the image quality settings for Radeon HD 4890 or GeForce GTX 275 type of solutions. On the contrary, you can add full-screen antialiasing to the maximum graphics quality settings without losing any of the performance or gaming comfort: the performance is high enough to allow that painlessly.
In Balanced mode average performance increases a little reaching almost 100 fps, although we still don’t see any influence from the CPU. Strange as it might seem, but despite noticeable lowering of the level of detail, the image quality remains barely affected, which most likely happens because of quality post-processing. Although there is no real practical value from it, because even low-power solutions cope OK with Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood in Best Quality mode. There is no reason to sacrifice even a bit of detail for the sake of increasing minimal performance from 60 to 70 fps.
Performance in Best Performance mode corresponds the name of this mode exactly: average, minimal and maximal readings increase dramatically. Peak performance of Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 275 reach 200 fps and minimum performance doesn’t go below 80 fps. It is also obvious that ATI solution takes revenge in this mode and starts to outperform the competitor. The effect of the system CPU remains minimal, just like in all other cases, and the difference falls within the acceptable measuring error for our test methodology.
From the visual standpoint, the price of the highest performance is truly monstrous. The game loses most of its beauty in Best Performance mode and becomes pretty dull and unimpressive. The primary thing to cause this unpleasant transformation seems to be disabled HDR and post processing effects. I can’t say that the game looks bad, you still can play just fine, but it is definitely not the 2009 graphics quality you would expect. It is hard to say who may need this particular gaming mode, especially since we know that budget Radeon HD 4670 shows acceptable results in Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood in Best Quality mode. The Best Performance mode may be used by the owners of first-generation graphics cards with Shader Model 3.0 support, such as GeForce 6/7 or Radeon X1000 series.
Overall, our test session revealed the following major peculiarities of Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood game. First, the game is not CPU dependent, and second, it hardly makes sense to use any detail profiles other than Best Quality, because Balanced profile doesn’t provide a substantial performance increase, while Best Performance profile makes the game really unattractive. Therefore, the owners of contemporary graphics accelerators such as Radeon HD 4670 or better should use Best Quality mode. If you have a more powerful graphics accelerator, you may try the Balanced mode: it will hardly cause a serious drop of the detail level, but is most likely to get the performance up substantially.
Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a worthy sequel to the first part, but unlike the latter doesn’t wolf down resources like crazy: even with maximum graphics quality settings the game sets pretty modest requirements to the graphics subsystem, so a Radeon HD 4770 or GeForce GTS 250 type graphics card will be sufficient for it in most cases. Since you can count Western games with the fingers of one hand, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood becomes even more valuable, also due to the fact that it follows closely all the genre rules and recreates the Wild West atmosphere in great detail. Among the obvious drawbacks, we could probably name extremely complex controls during gun duels that may cause some nerve cells to inexperienced and sensitive players, but eventually you can master it, too.
In terms of graphics quality, the game is flawless: the level of detail is high enough, the lighting model is excellent, and high-quality power-processing effects make a great addition to the picture hiding small visual defects. Edge-detect antialiasing replaces regular MSAA and does it so well that we have never felt like we lacked classical multisampling support.
As for performance, as we have already said, you won’t need to invest all you’ve got into a high-end graphics accelerator if you decide to enjoy the beauties of the Wild West: modest mainstream solution with around a $100 price tag will do just fine here. Even if you are going to play in 2560x1600 resolution, you won’t need dual-processor ATI or Nvidia monsters, just got for flagship single-GPU Radeon HD 4890 or GeForce GTX 285. Moreover, the game doesn’t require a super-powerful and super-expensive CPU: as we have just seen, the performance of two platforms - one on a relatively inexpensive Intel Core i7-920 and another on a pretty pricy Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition – is almost identical. So, you won’t need a flagship CPU either. Although, Core i7-920 is actually powerful enough for the majority of other games out there.
Summing things up, we would like to say that Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood is a very high-quality and at the same time undemanding game that most Western fans will love. It doesn’t require an unscheduled upgrade of your gaming platform unless your system is equipped with some really old components. Those who have limited budget should go for a Radeon HD 4770, and if you have a little more to spend, then you should consider GeForce GTX 275/285, as they provide higher minimal performance than the Advanced Micro Devices solutions of the same class.