Sapphire Radeon HD 5750

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.

The situation that we discovered on the previous page reversed itself here, with the HD 5750 surpassing the performance of the GTS 250 by a rather fair margin. Once again, at our 1080p resolution, the card pushed over 60 FPS. Considering that Bound in Blood isn’t an old game, and looks great, seeing this kind of performance on a $130 card is impressive.

Common sense will tell you that the more frames your computer can render per second, the smoother the gameplay. When looking at it from that perspective, ~40 FPS doesn’t seem that impressive, and with regards to our previously tested game, it wouldn’t be entirely acceptable. Bound in Blood is a little different, though, and anything above 30 FPS will prove playable for most people. It isn’t the most fluid at that frame rate, but I believe it’d be acceptable for most people. If worse comes to worst, all it takes is a disabling of the anti-aliasing to speed things up.