Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts patched to version 2.1.0.3. It's the expansion pack for 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 original game was updated to version 1.7.0 in June, and that patch brought DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine. We've compared the various DirectX 10 cards using the game's DirectX 10 mode and Opposing Fronts expands on the original's DirectX 10 features.

For our testing, we used the in-built demo to gauge performance, which is very similar to the original rolling demo, but with some new effects. 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 set to their maximum values, with anti-aliasing controlled from inside the game - we've included a screenshot of the settings used below. Anisotropic filtering was forced from the driver control panel in all cases.







Opposing Fronts tells a similar story to the previous games we’ve tested, in that the card performs well until it becomes starved of memory bandwidth. We found that the card is a match for the GeForce 8800 GTX at 1680x1050 0xAA 16xAF with the maximum in-game details and interestingly, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512 managed to deliver a much higher minimum frame rate.

We thought that this was initially an outlier and we fired up one of our GeForce 8800 GTX cards to double check that its minimum frame rate at this setting really was as low as we’d reported in the past. We re-tested with the latest beta driver on Nvidia’s website and recorded almost exactly the same numbers for both average and minimum frame rates. Hmm.