Company of Heroes

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Company of Heroes patched to version 1.7.0. 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.

The game was updated to version 1.7.0 in June, and this patch brings DirectX 10 capabilities to the game's engine. We've compared the various DirectX 10 cards using the game's DirectX 10 mode, but in addition we've also compared to previous generation cards under DX9 to give a wider performance perspective.

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.

The in-game details were lowered from their maximum details to a combination of "high" and "medium" - we've included a screenshot of the settings used below.





Under DirectX 9, there is no question that the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 is the fastest of the two new mid-range cards from AMD and Nvidia. The game is pretty heavily dominated by the Radeons, with only the GeForce 8600 GTS preventing a clean sweep at the resolutions and settings tested.



Things change a little under DirectX 10 mode though. The first thing to note is that we haven't changed anything but the shader quality setting - that's enough to cause performance to take a deep dive. While the Radeon HD 2600 XT GDDR4 still manages to beat its direct competition from the GeForce 8600 GT, it doesn't manage to beat off the challenge from the GeForce 8600 GTS.

At 1024x768 with these settings, the game is just about playable under DirectX 10, but the differences between the two modes are very small - certainly not worth the performance deficit at least. At 1280x1024, gameplay is just about playable on the GeForce 8600 GTS, but isn't on the HD 2600 XT and 8600 GT cards.