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.





Under DirectX 9, the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo GDDR3 card performs very well and will deliver very playable frame rates at 1680x1050 - you should be able to increase the quality a little too. It's not only faster than the GeForce 8600 GT, which performs quite poorly in comparison, but the higher core speed helps it to outperform Sapphire's Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 too.



Under DirectX 10, the situation changes a bit, as the GeForce 8600 GT catches up but still trails behind the two Radeons. However, the situation between the GDDR3 and GDDR4 versions of the HD 2600 XT doesn't change, as HIS's card ends up faster than Sapphire's GDDR4-based HD 2600 XT.