Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway

Publisher: Ubisoft

While it hasn’t been as successful as Activision’s Call of Duty: World at War, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway is still a fine game in its own right, continuing the Brothers in Arms franchise with the allied invasion of Holland during Operation Market Garden.

The combat is heavily squad reliant, with the players forced to use cover and covering fire to pin the enemy down and advance against their positions, with coordinated flanking tactics more important than pin point aim in achieving victory.

Running in the ever popular Unreal Engine 3, BIA:HH makes use of high resolution textures, destroyable cover and depth of field to deliver a highly detailed and convincing portrayal of wartime Holland. It's one of the most visually impressive Unreal Engine 3 implementations we've seen to date - a credit to Gearbox, the developers.

For testing we manually play through a section from the “Operation Market” chapter, with all in-game settings set to high. Unfortunately Unreal Engine 3 does not allow us to set anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering from in game. Anisotropic filtering was forced to 16x in the driver and anti-aliasing just isn't supported at all - when we tried forcing it in the driver, it made no difference to image quality or performance.





Hell's Highway isn't particularly intensive for the single card solutions at 1,680 x 1,050 and all are able to plough through our test section with high frame rates. There's very little difference between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB, Radeon HD 4870 512MB and GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB cards and it's no surprise that CrossFire and SLI are extremely CPU limited at this resolution – even with it clocked at over 3.7GHz!

There's a similar story at 1,920 x 1,200, with very little to choose between the single card configurations – the GTX 280 is ahead by around seven frames per second and all deliver over 60 fps, which makes the game exceedingly playable on these cards. This, however, is the first sign where CrossFire scaling isn't all it could be – both the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire configurations drop around ten frames per second behind the GeForce GTX 260+ SLI setup. Not particularly significant at over 80 fps, but a difference nevertheless.

At 2,560 x 1,600, performance is again evenly matched across the two Radeon HD 4870s and the GeForce GTX 260+ with the GTX 280 edging ahead by about 15 percent. With multiple GPUs though, there is quite a significant performance difference between the Radeon HD 4870 1GB CrossFire and GeForce GTX 260+ SLI setups – it ends up being over 18 percent and the GeForce GTX 280 SLI configuration is even further ahead.