Call of Juarez developer blasts Nvidia FUD attack

So, more than three weeks after Nvidia openly criticised the Call of Juarez DirectX 10 benchmark, a title that was a member of The Way Its Meant To Be Played marketing programme, we got an official answer from Techland addressing the Nvidian outburst.

Pawel Kopinski, PR Product Manager, explained how Nvidia distributed disputable information and send FUD about the DirectX 10 benchmark mode in Call of Juarez.

This is the firm's statement:

We are disappointed that Nvidia have seen fit to attack our benchmark in any way. We are proud of the game that we have created, and we feel that Nvidia can also be proud of the hardware that they have created. Nonetheless these artistic decisions about the settings of a game rightly belong in the hands of the games developer, not the hardware manufacturer.

Nvidia originally disputed the nature of FSAA, or the mode that Call of Juarez uses for benchmarking purposes. We were advised what non-public drivers to use, and in the end, we just had to call it quits on whole DX10 benchmarking affair, at least until both companies come up with WHQL drivers that work in all cases.

We got permission to show you the content of the e-mail itself, so you can read for yourself how Techland created its DirectX 10 benchmark and what was done to obtain highest-possible quality of rendered frames.

All DirectX 10 graphics hardware which supports MSAA is required to expose a feature called 'shader-assisted MSAA resolves' whereby a pixel shader can be used to access all of the individual samples for every pixel. This allows the graphics engine to introduce a higher quality custom MSAA resolve operation. The DirectX 10 version of 'Call of Juarez' leverages this feature to apply HDR-correct MSAA to its final render, resulting in consistently better anti-aliasing for the whole scene regardless of the wide variations in intensity present in HDR scenes. Microsoft added the feature to DirectX 10 at the request of both hardware vendors and games developers specifically so that we could raise final image quality in this kind of way, and we are proud of the uncompromising approach that we have taken to image quality in the latest version of our game.

"ExtraQuality" is a visual quality setting enabled by default in the DX10 version of Call of Juarez. In benchmark mode, "ExtraQuality" mode does two things. First, it increases shadow generation distance in order to apply shadowing onto a wider range of pixels on the screen, resulting in better quality throughout the benchmark run. Second, it increases the number of particles rendered with the geometry shader in order to produce more realistic-looking results, like for example waterfall, smoke and falling leaves. The attached screenshot illustrates those differences when ExtraQuality is disabled. ExtraQuality is designed as a default setting to reflect the visual improvements made possible by DX10 cards and is not meant to be disabled in any way.

All updates to shaders made in the final version of the Call of Juarez benchmark were made to improve performance or visual quality or both, for example to allow anisotropic texture filtering on more surfaces than before. This includes the use of more complex materials for a wider range of materials. At the same time we implemented shader code to improve performance on the more costly computations associated with more distant pixels,. Some materials were also tweaked in minor ways to improve overall image quality. One of the key strengths of NVIDIA's hardware is its ability to perform anisotropic filtering at high performance so we are puzzled that NVIDIA complains about this change when in effect it plays to their strengths.

In the end, Nvidia's FUD mail did not much matter, since its own product managed to beat ATI's HD2900XT in the benchmark. All that Graphzilla achieved is to devalue the benchmark, and, with Lost Planet TWIMTBP affair killed the trust of the market in another.

We have no doubt that Nvidia had the best intention to get its products looking as quick as possible, but in the end - it ended up with the market not trusting numbers produced by either benchmark.

Comparison between same scene in CoJ benchmark when DX9 and DX10 render paths are used...

As they say, road to hell is filled with good intentions. µ