Three things worth noting up front: first, as the benchmark takes you through some of Call of Juarez environments, it gives you a nice tour of how much more DirectX 10 brings to the table. I think all PC gamers are going to be happy with the visuals of the next generation of games as they start to hit the market.

Second, Techland notes in the Call of Juarez benchmark settings that super-sampling is benchmark only, so you should take super-sampling numbers with a grain of salt; they’re not as indicative of real-world performance.

Third, after running the tests, I did some digging around and found that there’s some debate about which ForceWare version is the best option to use when testing NVIDIA cards. I used 160.3, which has the highest numerical version but is technically in beta and dates from May 10 to get the numbers above. I then did an additional test with the most recent WHQL drivers (version 158.24), which date from June 1 and came back with lower FPS rates on both tests, so I opted to use my original results.

All of that said the results of the Call of Juarez benchmark were disappointing. The gorgeous graphics chugged jerkily along, tantalizing me with the possibilities of the engine without really delivering the experience. I’m hesitant to blame the card entirely, however; I think there might be some outstanding optimization problems with the ForceWare drivers that NVIDIA needs to address. Furthermore, we don’t have much of a sample size of DirectX 10 titles to work with and it could be Call of Juarez proves to be a bad benchmark.

Conclusions
In a world of ultra high-end video cards, the XFX ExTreme does a great job holding its own. It’s got a competitive price tag, an excellent performance boost over its stock Ultra compatriots and display abilities far above any other card on the market. The poor Call of Juarez results are inconclusive because of possible driver questions and, more importantly, because they conflict with the other test results. Overall, I feel confident recommending the Ultra ExTreme to potential buyers.