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.






In both DX9 and DX10 codepaths, the Zotac GeForce 8600 GT ZONE Edition is a slower card than the Radeon HD 2600 XT (both in GDDR3 and GDDR4 configurations) in this particular title. Despite having the same clock speeds, Zotac's card turns out to be slightly faster than Asus' EN8600 GT across the board. This is likely to be down to the fact that the Zotac's BIOS might have been tuned a little more than the Asus BIOS.