Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.7.1. 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 brought DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine. We've compared the various DirectX 10 cards using the game's DirectX 10 mode.

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 set to their maximum values, with anti-aliasing controlled from inside the game - we've included a screenshot of the settings used below. Anisotropic filtering was forced from the driver control panel in all cases.






Company of Heroes didn't give us any breathtaking performance increases either - at best, we saw about a two frame per second increase in the average frame rate. What was more interesting though was the increased minimum frame rates we experienced - these obviously go a long way to making gameplay a smoother experience. When anti-aliasing was disabled, we found that the minimum frame rate increased quite dramatically, by at least a few frames per second, which would be noticeable during gameplay if you're susceptible to frame rate lag when the frame rate drops below a certain threshold.