Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.5.0. 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 very 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. 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 both ATI's and Nvidia's previous generation cards to running with anti-aliasing enabled, so we have limited comparisons between the cards to 0xAA 16xAF at 1600x1200, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 with those cards. We've included 4xAA results too for the current generation cards. All in-game details were set to their maximum values.








AMD's Radeon HD 2900 XT starts out well in Company of Heroes and it really shows off its shader prowess. At 1600x1200, it's 20 percent faster than BFGTech's overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS with anti-aliasing disabled, and 12 percent faster with 4xAA enabled. The trend continues at 1920x1200, with similar percentage point improvements too.

At 2560x1600, the lead extends to 25 percent with anti-aliasing disabled and it's not too far behind the GeForce 8800 GTX, either. With 4xAA applied, the gap between the 8800 GTX and HD 2900 XT is restored and the gap between it and BFGTech's GeForce 8800 GTS hovers around the 16 percent mark.

In multi-GPU mode, the Radeon HD 2900 XT scales really well in this title with an 82 percent increase at 2560x1600 4xAA 16xAF - this is quite a bit better than we were expecting, to be honest. Sure, the two HD 2900 XTs aren't a match for a pair of GeForce 8800 GTXs, but it turns up around 11 percent faster than the competition at 2560x1600 4xAA 16xAF in the same price bracket.