Nvidia GeForce 8600 GTS

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 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 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 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 ATI's cards to run with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between the cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1280x1024, 1600x1200 and 1920x1200. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.




Nvidia's GeForce 8600 GTS will give you playable frame rates at 1280x1024 with maximum in-game quality settings turned on. Given the specifications of G84 and GeForce 8600 GTS's price point, this is what we expected to see. However, we would have hoped it would stand up to the outgoing DirectX 9 competition from the Radeon X1950 Pro a little better. At 1280x1024, the cards from Asus and BFGTech do manage to stand up to Nvidia's previous mid-range part, the GeForce 7900 GS, pretty well.

At 1600x1200, you're going to have to lower quality settings a little in order to attain smooth frame rates if 30 frames per second isn't suitable for you. We'd recommend doing that, as the frame rate can really take a hit when you get into some of the more intense portions of the game. Based on its performance in Company of Heroes, 1920x1200 is probably going to be a no-go zone for the GeForce 8600 GTS, unless you fancy playing the game with fairly low in-game quality settings.

One thing to remember here is that Company of Heroes is due for a DirectX 10 update in the next month or so, meaning that you're likely to be able to achieve much higher image quality on Nvidia's new part in comparison to what you currently get from ATI's Radeon X1950 Pro and Nvidia's GeForce 7900 GS.