While it hasn’t been as successful as Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is still a fine game in its own right, continuing the Brothers in Arms franchise with the allied invasion of Holland during Operation Market Garden.
The combat is heavily squad reliant, with the players forced to use cover and covering fire to pin the enemy down and advance against their positions, with coordinated flanking tactics more important than pin point aim in achieving victory.
Running in the ever popular Unreal Engine 3, BIA:HH makes use of high resolution textures, destroyable cover and depth of field to deliver a highly detailed and convincing portrayal of wartime Holland. It's one of the most visually impressive Unreal Engine 3 implementations we've seen to date - a credit to Gearbox, the developers.
For testing we manually play through a section from the “Operation Market” chapter, with all in-game settings set to high. Unfortunately Unreal Engine 3 does not allow us to set anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering from in game. Anisotropic filtering was forced to 16x in the driver and anti-aliasing just isn't supported at all - when we tried forcing it in the driver, it made no difference to image quality or performance.
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
1,680 x 1,050 0xAA 16xAF, DirectX 9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB SLI
Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB SLI
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB AMP!
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
97.6
82.0
96.5
78.0
95.9
75.0
93.3
74.0
92.2
72.0
91.5
72.0
88.9
66.0
83.9
66.0
78.1
63.0
75.5
58.0
74.9
59.0
74.7
59.0
0
25
50
75
100
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
1,920 x 1,200 0xAA 16xAF, DirectX 9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB SLI
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB SLI
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB AMP!
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
96.3
77.0
95.9
82.0
94.3
75.0
85.2
63.0
84.4
66.0
83.5
56.0
80.3
63.0
72.4
58.0
67.5
57.0
65.4
55.0
65.1
51.0
64.9
55.0
0
25
50
75
100
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway
2,560 x 1,600 0xAA 16xAF, DirectX 9, Maximum Detail
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB SLI
Nvidia GeForce GTX 295 1,792MB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB SLI
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire
ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB
Zotac GeForce GTX 285 1GB AMP!
Nvidia GeForce GTX 285 1GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 1GB
HIS ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo
ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
Nvidia GeForce GTX 260-216 896MB
ATI Radeon HD 4870 512MB
89.4
73.0
83.9
66.0
78.9
63.0
66.6
53.0
64.1
51.0
60.5
48.0
56.2
45.0
50.6
41.0
46.3
38.0
44.1
36.0
43.7
35.0
43.3
35.0
0
10
20
30
40
50
60
70
80
90
Frames Per Second
Average
Minimum
The Radeon HD 4870 1GB and GeForce GTX 260-216 perform very similarly in Hell's Highway right across the board - there's nothing in it at all. What the HIS Radeon HD 4870 1GB IceQ4+ Turbo's increased clock speeds do is improve performance by up to five percent, depending on the resolution - it works out at roughly two frames per second and that's something that you're not going to notice in a blind taste test.