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.







The scaling problems we encountered during our GeForce 8800 GT review are still apparent, even despite updating Company of Heroes from the original to the expansion pack, Opposing Fronts. The problems didn't start to come into play until we increased the resolution above 1680x1050, but even at this resolution CrossFire scaled better when it comes to raw percentage increase in frame rate.

However, the GeForce 8800 GT is a faster product at 1680x1050, even in SLI, so the fact that the Radeon HD 3870 CrossFire configuration scales better is all a little bit moot. Additionally, a single GeForce 8800 GT 512MB is appreciably faster than a single Radeon HD 3870, but both deliver decent enough performance to play the game smoothly at up to 1920x1200 0xAA 16xAF.

At higher settings, both cards drop into the realms of choppy frame rates and deliver varying levels of unplayability. That said, at a push, you might find 24 frames per second on a single GeForce 8800 GT at 1920x1200 4xAA 16xAF reasonably acceptable -- it's all down to personal preference at those kinds of frame rates.