Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL ACS6

NVIDIA System Setup

• Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL – operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1500MHz using Forceware 93.71 WHQL;
  
• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 320MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 550/1300/1600MHz using Forceware 97.92 WHQL;
  
• Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX 512MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 650/1600MHz using Forceware 93.71 WHQL;
  
• Nvidia GeForce 7900 GT 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 450/1320MHz using Forceware 93.71 WHQL;
  
• Nvidia GeForce 7900 GS 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 450/1320MHz using Forceware 93.71 WHQL.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (operating at 2.40GHz - 9x266MHz); Asus Striker Extreme motherboard (nForce 680i SLI); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12-1T timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; OCZ GameXtreme 700W PSU; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI standalone drivers version 9.53 WHQL.

ATI System Setup:

• ATI Radeon X1950 XTX 512MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 650/2000MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL
  
• Connect3D Radeon X1950 XT 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 621/1800MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL;
  
• ATI Radeon X1950 Pro 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 580/1400MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL;
  
• Connect3D Radeon X1900 GT 256MB – operating at its default clock speeds of 575/1200MHz using Catalyst 7.1 WHQL;.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (operating at 2.40GHz - 9x266MHz); Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard (975X Express); 2 x 1GB Corsair XMS2-8500C5 (operating in dual channel at DDR2-800 with 4-4-4-12 timings); Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 200GB SATA hard drive; OCZ GameXtreme 700W PSU; Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2; DirectX 9.0c; Intel inf version 7.22 WHQL.

Company of Heroes:

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.3.0. 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. It's also scheduled to get a DirectX 10 update soon.

The graphics already look superb, but with the additional performance benefits and image quality enhancements that DirectX 10 will bring, we're expecting it to look even better than it does now. Relic tells us that it plans to make extensive use of the geometry shader, with the addition of things like point shadows and also fuzzy grass support too. By fuzzy grass, Relic means grass that will have micro displacements that break up the detail in the base terrain texturing.

Relic also plans to leverage some of the other benefits to DirectX 10, to improve performance with more graphical features turned on. The developer's plan to add more detail into the world with more smaller object details in the world. Of course, all of these will react with the world and will be fully destructible like every other element in the Company of Heroes world. 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 ATI's cards to run with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between the cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.




At both 1600x1200 and 1920x1200, the Inno3D GeForce 7900 GS iChiLL was not particularly playable with maximum details, but you should be able to attain decent frame rates at 1600x1200 if you lower the details a little. With the resolution set to 1280x1024 - the card's most likely resolution, the iChiLL's performance was on a par with the Radeon X1900 GT and Radeon X1950 Pro.

Connect3D's Radeon X1950 XT 256MB costs around 25% more than the iChiLL, but in return you get around 50% more performance and it'll deliver very playable frame rates at 1600x1200 with maximum details, and acceptable frame rates for gaming at 1920x1200 too. This is something that the Inno3D card was unable to manage, but we don't think that it's really much of an issue considering the price.