It looks like the DirectX 10 floodgates are ever so slowly starting to creak open. First, there was the public demo of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, which came in both DX9 and DX10 variants. That was a major letdown. Not only does it basically not work at all on ATI's DX10 cards, it runs terribly slowly on Nvidia's without looking any better than the DX9 version. Hey, it's just a demo of an unreleased game, so there's still hope for really dramatic improvements before release.

The first actually released DX10 game, sort of, is Company of Heroes. As of the new 1.7 patch, DX10 support has been added to spruce up the graphics a little bit. This at least looks marginally better than the DX9 rendering path and works properly on all the new DX10 cards (with the latest drivers, naturally), but it's still a bit of a letdown. The performance cost is pretty severe, given the modest visual improvements.

Enter Call of Juarez. This spaghetti western shooter from Techland was released in Europe last year, and just recently in North America. Any day now, it should get a similar DX10 patch, adding some nice new visual effects at the expense of speed for those who have a DX10 graphics card and Windows Vista. Techland released a DX10 benchmark using Call of Juarez back around the time of the Radeon HD 2900 XT launch, but it was a little buggy and unoptimized. Now, the developers have released their final, official DX10 benchmark, so we're ready to give it a whirl. Continued...