Dawn of War 2

Publisher: THQ

The sequel to Relic's incredibly popular Dawn of War series takes the legendary Warhammer 40k universe to another level, with the player slogging through hordes of Orks, Eldar and swarming Tyranids with the Space Marines of the Blood Ravens. It's a little different to traditional RTS titles, with emphasis placed on small scale squad tactics rather than tank rushes and superweapons, but with RTS maestro Relic behind the reins, the result is one of the best strategy games in ages.

It's a looker too, running on a modified version of Relic's Essence Engine, Essence 2.0, a more demanding version of the engine used in the Company of Heroes series. This makes for some pretty demanding graphics and while the single player campaign is specifically limited to keep the unit count down and the performance up, the game's multiplayer can get much more demanding when dozens of squads and literally hundreds of units hit the screen at the same time.

Thoughtfully Relic has included an excellent in-game benchmark in the game's performance tab which is very representative of real world gameplay. Sadly though, the scores it produces seem to be bugged (minimum frame rates in particular are all over the place), so we've subbed in FRAPS to capture the average and minimum frame rates over this very demanding time demo.








While it might have an advantage in Fallout 3 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 doesn't deliver fantastic performance in every game, a fact that Dawn of War 2 makes plainly obvious. Even at 1,680 x 1,050 the ATI card struggles to deliver playably smooth framerates when things get really busy on screen, with a decidedly chuggy minimum of 19fps at 1,680 x 1,050.

In comparison the GeForce GTX 295 and GTX 285 are both much better options and are very evenly matched, but the GTX 285's faster single GPU edges it over the GTX 295's dual GPUs thanks to better performance with anti aliasing enabled at both 1,680 and 1,920.

Nvidia draws one back for 2-1, but it's strangely the cheaper GTX 285 that nails the net.