Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.5.0. It's touted as one of the best real-time strategy games of all time. Not only is the gameplay incredibly good and immersive, the graphics engine is simply stunning, making extensive use of post processing and advanced lighting techniques in the fully destructible environment.

The game was recently updated to version 1.7.0, which brings DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine, but unfortunately our testing for this review was completed before that patch came out. We'll be taking a look DirectX 10 performance and image quality in Company of Heroes very soon.

For our testing, we used the in-built demo to gauge performance - in this rolling demo, there is heavy use of water, lighting, explosions and also masses of vegetation and it represents fairly typical performance throughout the game.

We had some problems getting both ATI's and Nvidia's previous generation cards to running with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between those cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with those cards. We've included 4xAA results too for the current generation cards. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.








Taking the similar clock speeds into account, it's no surprise that XFX's card performs almost identically to EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked card in this title. This means that the XFX's card is still slower than a pair of GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards, or a pair of Radeon HD 2900 XTs, but it's not like you're short of performance in this title under DirectX 9.0. We'll be coming back to DirectX 10 performance in this title in a separate article very soon.