Gigabyte Radeon HD 4770 512MB

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.

CoJ: Bound in Blood has fantastic graphics, but that doesn’t mean you need a monster machine to play it reliably. The opposite can be said, since we saw incredible performance from our HD 4770 at 1920×1080… almost 60 FPS! That’s with max detail. Better than that, though, is that the minimum FPS didn’t once dip below 40, which means ultra-smooth gameplay.

Because the game happens quite well on modest hardware, I gave 2560x a try and was pretty impressed. It wasn’t stellar with the default settings we used, but backing the detail settings from max down to normal improved things greatly. Having a minimum frame rate of 24 isn’t exactly desirable, but if you have a 30″ monitor, it’s certainly not going to keep you from playing the game that way.