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.





Company of Heroes really seems to benefit ATI graphics cards in DirectX 9 mode, but given the fact that the XFX GeForce 8600 GT 620M XXX Edition manages to deliver smooth frame rates all the way up to 1680x1050, there shouldn't be anything to worry about here. When you get to 40 frames per second in this game, there is scope to increase the quality settings, or turn anti-aliasing on.

The latter, however, has proven to be a thorn in the side for the new Radeon HD 2000 series cards.



In DX10 mode, the XFX 8600 GT XXX Edition is slower than the competing Radeons, but not by a sizeable margin - we're looking at a one to two frame per second deficit. At 1024x768, the framerates are just about playable across the board with an exception going to the stock-clocked Asus EN8600GT. However, at 1280x1024, you're going to have to lower the in-game quality settings on all cards in order to get a decent frame rate using the DX10 renderpath.