ATI’s Radeon HD 5450 – The Perfect HTPC Card?

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.

As mentioned in the past, ATI cards tend to excel at this particular title, so it’s not much of a surprise that the 210 is left in the dust. The HD 5450 doubled the minimum FPS and starkly increased the average.

At the above-listed settings, the game played just fine. I have to stress that lowering the settings in this particular title makes for a starkly different (and mostly ugly) game, but at least we didn’t need to decrease our detail lower than medium.