Inno3D GeForce 7950 GT iChiLL G5G3C

Company of Heroes:

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.3.0. 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. It's also scheduled to get a DirectX 10 update soon.

The graphics already look superb, but with the additional performance benefits and image quality enhancements that DirectX 10 will bring, we're expecting it to look even better than it does now. Relic tells us that it plans to make extensive use of the geometry shader, with the addition of things like point shadows and also fuzzy grass support too. By fuzzy grass, Relic means grass that will have micro displacements that break up the detail in the base terrain texturing.

Relic also plans to leverage some of the other benefits to DirectX 10, to improve performance with more graphical features turned on. The developer's plan to add more detail into the world with more smaller object details in the world. Of course, all of these will react with the world and will be fully destructible like every other element in the Company of Heroes world. 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 ATI's cards to run with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between the cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.


This game really does demonstrate the added horsepower the fully fledged high-end cards can deliver. Unfortunately the 7950 GT isn't quite in that league and consistently finds itself propping up the five big-guns at the top. However, the important thing is that even at 1920x1200 this card will just about give you a playable frame rate, though you will have to drop any anti-aliasing. Ideally you'd want to be running at 1600x1200 or below with at least 2xAA for the best experience.

In comparison to the PowerColor SCS3, the iChiLL 7950 GT just comes out the winner with consistently higher framerates, there's not much in it though. Only at 1920x1200 0xAA might the performance advantage mean the difference between playable and unplayable framerates.