Call of Juarez – DX9 vs. DX10

Though Vista was released over seven months ago, there’s been no software to support Microsoft’s push on DX10 technology. Sure, we’ve seen a few games with “patches”, but that’s hardly an impressive showing. Most recently, Lost Planet included DX10 support, but showed us virtually nothing special. It didn’t help that the game was boring to begin with, either.

Hard|OCP takes the latest DX10 game for a spin, Call of Juarez. This isn’t a game with a simple patch… it’s a game that fully supports DX10 right out of the box, though DX9 is still supported, of course. Their opinions? Very good, overall. It seems like we might finally have a reason to boot into Vista.

For the first time this year we are seeing DirectX 10 provide a real improvement to the gameplay experience. We noticed mostly the higher resolution textures and relief mapping along with HDR and lighting improvements. The texture difference is literally night and day. In DirectX 9 mode all mountain, rock, tree, and ground surfaces have a less detailed texture. Once you run in DirectX 10 mode these textures are replaced by a higher resolution detailed texture and better pixel shader effects such as relief mapping. That alone makes the game look very different between DX9 and DX10.

Source: Hard|OCP