by Rob Williams on March 29, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
We’ve learned a lot about NVIDIA’s GF100 (Fermi) architecture over the past year, and after what seemed like an eternal wait, the company has officially announced the first two cards as part of the series; the GeForce GTX 470 and GTX 480. To start, we’re taking a look at the latter, so read on to see if it GF100 was worth the wait.
When the original Call of Juarez was released, it brought forth something unique… a western-styled first-person shooter. That’s simply not something we see too often, so for fans of the genre, its release was a real treat. Although it didn’t really offer the best gameplay we’ve seen from a recent FPS title, its storyline and unique style made it well-worth testing.
After we retired the original title from our suite, we anxiously awaited for the sequel, Bound in Blood, in hopes that the series could be re-introduced into our testing once again. Thankfully, it could, thanks in part to its fantastic graphics, which are based around the Chrome Engine 4, and improved gameplay of the original. It was also well-received by game reviewers, which is always a good sign.
Manual Run-through: The level chosen here is Chapter I, and our starting point is about 15 minutes into the mission, where we stand atop a hill that overlooks a large river. We make our way across the hill and ultimately through a large trench, and we stop our benchmarking run shortly after we blow up a gas-filled barrel.
Bound in Blood tends to favor ATI cards for whatever reason, and that’s well evidenced here. The GTX 480 falls well behind at our 1680×1050 and 1920×1080 resolutions, but comes out even at 2560×1600. It doesn’t need to be said, but after 100 FPS, the differences just aren’t going to be noticeable, so for what it’s worth, both cards are ideal for this game.
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|
|
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ATI HD Radeon 5870 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
58
|
82.863
|
NVIDIA GTX 480 1.5GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
58
|
82.711
|
ATI HD 5770 1GB CrossFireX
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
59
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87.583
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NVIDIA GTX 295 1792MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
37
|
80.339
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ATI HD 5850 1GB (ASUS)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
51
|
69.165
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ATI HD 5830 1GB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
35
|
54.675
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NVIDIA GTX 285 1GB (EVGA)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
45
|
54.428
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NVIDIA GTX 275 896MB (Reference)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
41
|
51.393
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ATI HD 5770 1GB (Reference)
|
2560×1600 – Max Detail
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28
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45.028
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NVIDIA GTX 260 896MB (XFX)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
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35
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44.023
|
ATI HD 5750 1GB (Sapphire)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
27
|
38.686
|
NVIDIA GTX 250 1GB (EVGA)
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2560×1600 – Max Detail
|
25
|
33.751
|
ATI HD 5670 512MB (Reference)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail
|
38
|
47.23
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NVIDIA GT 240 512MB (ASUS)
|
1920×1080 – Max Detail
|
29
|
39.446
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ATI HD 5570 1GB (Sapphire)
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1920×1080 – Max Detail
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24
|
32.931
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Bound in Blood suffers the same issue that many other PC games today do… the engine doesn’t take full advantage of our PC’s. So once again, topped-out settings are fine here on almost our entire line-up of cards.