Company of Heroes DX10 comparison

Conclusions

We spent a fair while flicking between our comparative screenshots from the DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 version and, though it took us a while, we were able to finally spot a few differences.

Extra detail on the terrain and a little more smoke and physics effects make the game look a fair bit better, although you don't really realise it at the time unless you look for it deliberately, though we will admit that the short grass effects are very nice and on comparison the close-up terrain textures do look better. Still, it takes a comparison screenshot to really illustrate the difference as the effect isn't exactly enough to bowl us over on its own.

The problem was though that the these effects did take a while to spot and weren't the groundbreaking advances that we have been waiting for. The benefits of DirectX 10 are definitely present in Company of Heroes, but you won't miss them if you can't get to them and, realistically, nobody's going to buy Vista to run a year-old RTS, especially when the improvements aren't that dramatic, especially when the performance is, well, rather poor at the moment.


We can't really blame Relic for the poor performance though, and to be fair it's hard to really put blame on either AMD or Nvidia too. DirectX 10 drivers are in their infancy and it's important to achieve stability before delivering more performance. We're sure that, over the next few months, we'll see some performance improvements under DirectX 10.

More importantly, we must give kudos to Relic for taking the time to give Company of Heroes fans a graphical update for free. It's incredibly hard to take a DirectX 9.0 game and successfully port it to DirectX 10 - there are undoubtedly a lot of features that the developers had to turn down because they would have required a complete engine overhaul. Given the amount of time we could imagine that taking, it wasn't worth it when there is essentially no financial return on the developer's time. From what we've been told though, there will be some more pronounced DirectX 10 effects in the expansion pack which is coming later this year.


Importantly, these conclusions are similar to the thoughts we had on the DirectX 10 demo of Lost Planet: Extreme Condition which also offered slight improvements in graphics quality, but the performance was again the real problem.

The real test for DirectX 10 will be when the triple A titles which were developed with DirectX 10 in mind start to creep on to the shelves and make it more obvious just what DirectX 10 can offer gamers in terms of noticeable graphical power. Until that point though, we'll probably keep our gaming PC running Windows XP for just a few more months.