Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts patched to version 2.1.0.3. It's the expansion pack for 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 original game was updated to version 1.7.0 in June, and that patch brought DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine. We've compared the various DirectX 10 cards using the game's DirectX 10 mode and Opposing Fronts expands on the original's DirectX 10 features.

For our testing, we used the in-built demo to gauge performance, which is very similar to the original rolling demo, but with some new effects. 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.

The in-game details were set to their maximum values, with anti-aliasing controlled from inside the game - we've included a screenshot of the settings used below. Anisotropic filtering was forced from the driver control panel in all cases.






Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts doesn’t treat the Asus EAH3870 TOP particularly well. At 1680x1050 it not only falls well behind the GeForce 8800 GT with no anti-aliasing, but it gets worse when AA is enabled! Thankfully, the Radeon’s performance picks up enough at 1920x1200 though, where it manages to almost match Nvidia’s latest performance mainstream part.

Sadly, neither the Asus EAH3870 TOP, nor the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT are able to deliver enough performance to play the game with smooth frame rates at 1920x1200 with 4xAA applied.

Before we move on, it’s also worth mentioning that we encountered some strange stability problems with Opposing Fronts, where the game would randomly crash because the driver had stopped functioning correctly during the latter stages of our testing. However, when we tried the card in another system, the problems appeared to go away, so we’re assuming this is a ‘feature’ built into Windows Vista that crops up at random intervals.

In addition to that, Asus suggested that we clocked the card back and the problems still existed, so we tried another Radeon HD 3870 that we had sitting in the office – things didn't change and we still had problems with our standard test configuration and this particular game.