Company of Heroes – DX9 vs. DX10

The cool thing about CoH is that the DX10 benchmark is identical to the DX9 one in terms of the cinematic sequence that is rendered on the screen. The way the sequence looks is of course different between the two API’s, but this allows us to draw direct comparisons between the performances of any DX10 capable graphics card. The only difference in our quality settings between DX9 and DX10 in CoH was the selection of “Direct3D 10” on the Shader Quality field instead of “High”.




You can see from these results that the performance hit from DirectX 10 is absolutely huge in Company of Heroes. Performance decreases to less than half when the new API is used. Not only that, but CrossFire, DirectX 10, and Company of Heroes don’t seem to get along very well. There are slight improvements in the scores after enabling CrossFire, but they’re nothing to write home about.

Call of Juarez

The DirectX 10 Benchmark incorporated into the 1.1.1.0 release of Call of Juarez is a great way to test a graphics card’s ability to operate under DX10. There are a series of “tests” where the fly-through demo stresses various features that are new to DirectX 10. This is by far the most stressful test we can remember putting a graphics card through in the gaming space, and it is for a pretty good reason too. Call of Juarez in DirectX 10, and indeed the Call of Juarez DirectX 10 Benchmark, is the second nicest looking game we have ever been allowed to play. Considering that this second place is only to a very early build of Crysis (a full DX10 game, CoJ is a DX9 game that is patched to DX10) at CES earlier this year, that is pretty impressive.


The method of calculating frame rates was sort of suspect in the benchmark, considering the display seemed far less choppy with a single card than it did in CrossFire mode, but we trust the results nevertheless. The highest average frame rate we were able to achieve was a mere 44.3 FPS. It is a really small number, especially for 1280x1024 resolution, but every single one of those frames was hard-fought.