by Rob Williams on May 17, 2010 in Graphics & Displays
When AMD launched its ATI Eyefinity technology, it helped redefine high-end gaming, and effectively made 2560×1600 look like child’s play. In this article, we put the technology to a good test across 18 different games and on both 3×1 (5760×1080) and 3×2 (5760×2160) display configurations to see just how worthy Eyefinity is.
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.
After seeing just how poorly Modern Warfare 2 could handle Eyefinity at 5760×1080, I was relieved to see that Call of Juarez handled it almost perfectly. The menu screens are a little stretched, but the quality of it doesn’t degrade (fonts are natural sizes still). The game in both configurations was just fine though, as the screenshots above show.
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 performance seen here was also very good, and once again, the 32 FPS average with a single GPU on the six monitors was borderline, but it still ran well enough to be considered very playable.
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5760×1080 – Single GPU
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Max Detail
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46
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57.711
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5760×1080 – Dual GPU
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Max Detail
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78
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104.545
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5760×2160 – Single GPU
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Max Detail
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22
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32.081
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5760×2160 – Dual GPU
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Max Detail
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42
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60.352
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Like Modern Warfare 2, the performance at max detail was acceptable through all of our configurations, so nothing had to be changed here.