Company of Heroes DX10 comparison

DirectX 10 features:

What these features do is essentially make the background art of Company of Heroes much more snazzy and crisp looking. Litter objects does exactly what it says on the tin, sprinkling around handfuls of litter and debris which physics can interact with when grenades go off nearby.

Short grass meanwhile takes the normally flat levels and bulks them up a bit by applying a grass 'shell' over the Draw Instanced API so that the grass becomes actually 3d and can be seen around the boots of soldiers. This effect is applied when terrain detail is pushed up to ultra, a process which should also improve the crispness of the overall terrain textures.

Under DirectX 10, there are also a wide range of general improvements according to developer, Relic, such as 100% per-pixel lighting which allows shadows to appear softer and lighting more details. Whether this has any notable effect in game however is a different matter altogether.


So, with the new settings set and everything else pushed to the limit, we jumped back into the same level as before and checked finely for differences, snapping screenshots all the time.

To be honest though, differences were incredibly hard to spot in game and the only thing we could definitely put our finger on as having improved were the water reflections in the performance test and the explosions which, on close inspection, look a lot less pixellated and blocky than their DirectX9 counterparts.

The other major difference that crops up in DirectX 10 is a lot more subtle and it wasn't until we were comparing screenshots that we were able to put our fingers on it. The overall detail of the terrain textures was much better though, with crisper details which made the levels look a lot better without being immediately obvious at first.


The same was true of the smoke effects and physics, both of which it seems there is more of but take a while to appreciate as the game forces players to focus more on their selected squads than the amount of boulders and dead bodies flipping through the air and the plumes of smoke can be more of an impediment than eye candy.

Now, lets check out how DirectX 10 fares in terms of performance against the DirectX 9 version of the game...