G80: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

Company of Heroes:

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.2.0. 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 sometime after the launch of Windows Vista.

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 played a five-minute run through from the beginning of the Normandy level. There's heavy use of water, lighting, explosions and also masses of vegetation during the run through and it represents a 'typical' portion of single player game action.

24" widescreen gaming:

The GeForce 8800 GTX simply marched through Normandy like we've never experienced before - the image quality was frankly stunning with all options turned up to their maximum settings. On top of that though, we turned on NVIDIA's highest-quality coverage sampling anti-aliasing pattern. However, we found that we were not able to completely max everything out - we had to leave transparency super-sampling disabled because the performance hit was just too great.

Due to the large amount of vegetation in our test scenario, we can understand exactly why transparency super-sampling hit GeForce 8800 GTX pretty hard. With that said though, the gaming experience was, again, simply breathtaking - there were occasions where I'd forget that I was actually benchmarking and just continue playing the mission until its climax.

The GeForce 7950 GX2 takes a beating here because the game has some serious performance issues with SLI and CrossFire at the moment. With the card left in its default mode, the ground textures flashed on and off, rendering the game unplayable. Relic has apparently mentioned that the problem is at its end and that there will be a 1.3.0 patch that fixes the problems soon. However, in our quest for information, we found that if you force the multi-GPU rendering mode to "Alternate Frame Rendering 2", the texture flashing disappears. There is one catch though, in that performance isn't anywhere near where it should be - this is one of those catches with GeForce 7950 GX2. We'll have to see how well Company of Heroes performs on GeForce 7950 GX2 once the new patch arrives.

ATI's Radeon X1950 XTX performed much better than the GeForce 7950 GX2, as we were able to turn 2xAA on without being cut down by a swarm of jaggies. This title proves that the Radeon X1950 XTX was a better proposition than the GeForce 7950 GX2 when it launched. However, that proposition is now worn away completely - it's simply no contest in this title!

30" widescreen gaming:

It's the same story here, with the GeForce 8800 GTX still being capable of amazing quality settings at this monstrous resolution. Neither GeForce 7950 GX2 nor Radeon X1950 XTX were capable of playing the game with either maximum details or anti-aliasing enabled. In contrast, GeForce 8800 GTX was able to play the game incredibly smoothly with 4x transparency multi-sampling enabled along with 16xAF.

The Radeon X1950 XTX has the edge here over the 7950 GX2 thanks to the better texture filtering quality and the increased in-game details. That mini-battle might change when Relic releases the patch to fix the multi-GPU problems the game currently has. However, that doesn't change the story though because what's clear is that if you want to play Company of Heroes on a 30" Dell, you'd better get yourself a GeForce 8800 GTX.