Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Publisher: Ubisoft

While it hasn’t been as successful as Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is still a fine game in its own right, continuing the Brothers in Arms franchise with the allied invasion of Holland during Operation Market Garden.

The combat is heavily squad reliant, with the players forced to use cover and covering fire to pin the enemy down and advance against their positions, with coordinated flanking tactics more important than pin point aim in achieving victory.

Running in the ever popular Unreal Engine 3, BIA:HH makes use of high resolution textures, destroyable cover and depth of field to deliver a highly detailed and convincing portrayal of wartime Holland. It's one of the most visually impressive Unreal Engine 3 implementations we've seen to date - a credit to Gearbox, the developers.

For testing we manually play through a section from the “Operation Market” chapter, with all in-game settings set to high. Unfortunately Unreal Engine 3 does not allow us to set anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering from in game. Anisotropic filtering was forced to 16x in the driver and anti-aliasing just isn't supported at all - when we tried forcing it in the driver, it made no difference to image quality or performance.





While the advantage might only be slight at 1,680 x1,050 in the Unreal Engine 3 driven Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, it's clear that the GTX 295 has the advantage over the 4870 X2 here. At higher resolutions the gap between the two dual GPU cards become even more obvious, with a performance gulf appearing by the time you reach 2,560 x 1,600 at the GeForce GTX 295 proves to be a good 15 frames per second faster.

Sadly, neither card boasts any sort of reasonable performance boost when used in SLI or CrossFire though, and the difference between a single GTX 295 and an SLI configuration at 2,560 x 1,600, where we would expect to see the clearest advantage of SLI, is just ten frames per second, or twelve percent. CrossFire 4870 X2s fare a little better, with only marginal improvements at the highest resolution and absolutely no difference between single and multi card performance at 1,680 x 1,050.