Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.5.0. 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 recently updated to version 1.7.0, which brings DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine, but in order to keep a wide selection of comparisons to other graphics cards, we completed testing with the 1.5.0 patch -- we are in the process of compiling another high-end performance comparison that does use the 1.7.0 patch for Company of Heroes, so keep an eye out for that.

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 both ATI's and Nvidia's previous generation cards to running with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between those cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with those cards. We've included 4xAA results too for the current generation cards. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.








The Zotac GeForce 8800 GTX AMP! Edition yields slightly lower performance than the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX KO Superclocked ACS³ card because of the lower shader clock. The performance deficit was generally a fraction of a frame per second though, so you'll be pushed to notice any real-world performance differences in this title.