BFGTech 8800 GTX Watercooled Edition

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 sometime after the launch of Windows Vista.

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 played a five-minute run through from the beginning of the Normandy level. There's heavy use of water, lighting, explosions and also masses of vegetation during the run through and it represents a 'typical' portion of single player game action.

24" widescreen gaming:

Company Of Heroes is one of the most graphically demanding games out there at the moment, so it's not surprising to see a gap emerge between the two GeForce 8800 GTX's and BFG's 8800 GTS. We were almost able to set the highest-available image quality on GeForce 8800 GTX, including 16xQ anti-aliasing with transparency multisampling.

We tried using transparency supersampling on the GeForce 8800 GTX's, but performance was pretty poor because of the large amount of alpha-tested textures used to make up most of the foliage. With that said, the game doesn't really require transparency supersampling like some games - the game looks superb with just transparency multisampling enabled.

30" widescreen gaming:

At 2560x1600, we had to reduce the shadow detail in order to maintain smooth gameplay on the 8800 GTX cards, but that didn't affect the gaming experience massively. We were still able to leave 4xAA with transparency multisampling enabled, too. With the GeForce 8800 GTS, we had to lower quite a few of the quality settings in order to maintain smooth gameplay. Shadows were reduced to low, while effects, physics, tree and terrain details were reduced to medium. All of the remaining settings were left set at their maximum selectable option.