Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.5.0. 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 very 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. 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 both ATI's and Nvidia's previous generation cards to running with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between the cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with those cards. We've included 4xAA results too for the current generation cards. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.








As expected, EVGA’s e-GeForce 8800 Ultra was appreciably faster than the reference-clocked 8800 Ultra when anti-aliasing was enabled, with percentage gains improving with resolution. However, it was slower than both a pair of mildly overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB cards running in SLI and a pair of CrossFired Radeon HD 2900 XT 512MB graphics cards, despite costing more than both of these pairs.

Compared to EVGA’s Superclocked e-GeForce 8800 GTX ACS3 card, it could be argued that the company’s pre-overclocked Ultra didn’t deliver enough of a performance increase to warrant the £100 price premium. At best, the performance increase was just under 10 percent in this title, but in order to experience that kind of performance gain, you’re going to need either high resolutions with 4xAA or either 8x or 16xCSAA in this title.

There’s no doubting that this is the fastest single card solution we’ve seen in this title, but one already has to question the value proposition it offers. You just can’t get away from the fact it’s going to cost you over half a grand.