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.







SLI scaling on BFGTech's GeForce 8600 GTS OC2 works pretty well with DirectX 9.0 shaders in Company of Heroes, but unfortunately under DirectX 10, scaling isn't quite as good as we would expect. Bear in mind that the drivers we're using are the latest official WHQL certified drivers, but there may be some small improvements made with the newer betas.

If anything, SLI performance makes the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB a better buy, with prices starting at around £180 (inc. VAT) - just £40 more than the cost of a single BFGTech GeForce 8600 GTS OC2, nevermind a pair!