Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.7.0. 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 updated to version 1.7.0 in June, and this patch brings DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine. We've compared the various DirectX 10 cards using the game's DirectX 10 mode, but in addition we've also compared to previous generation cards under DX9 to give a wider performance perspective.

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.

The in-game details were lowered from their maximum details to a combination of "high" and "medium" - we've included a screenshot of the settings used below.






Because Inno3D hasn't increased the shader clock, the frequency that can have the largest affect on performance in shader-heavy games, the performance advantage over the standard-clocked GeForce 8600 GTS is not particularly large. Not only has the shader throughput not increased, but both the pixel and texture fillrates have only been increased by all of four percent.

DirectX 10 performance isn't wonderful by any stretch of the imagination and, given the small benefits and huge drop in performance, we'd say that good performance with pretty good image quality is a fair tradeoff to make.