Company of Heroes (v2.102)

We’re not the biggest fans of Company of Heroes or the built-in benchmark test that it offers. The game has always seemed very particular about which graphics settings you select and which resolution you run. The benchmark also freezes very often under Windows Vista, which is not a pleasant experience. Nevertheless, it is widely used by other publications and will continue to be used by us until a better candidate for our testing suite reveals itself. To set our graphics settings, we selected the “High” shader quality (DX9) and moved all fields to the highest available values. This would be our DirectX9 test. For DirectX10, we only changed the shader quality to Direct3D 10 – we did not make use of the extra settings that become available in other fields.


You can see here that all of the cards perform quite well in DirectX 9. Since CoH is an RTS game, these frame rates are exceptional. However, the built-in benchmark for CoH is not exactly what we would call representative of the gameplay, so the results it gives you are probably not the best indication of real-world performance in-game. You can see that the 8800GTX takes the top spot once more, and right behind it is the newcomer 8800GT. The Radeon HD2900XT really fails to impress as resolution increase, as does the GeForce 8800GTS. SLI Scaling in Company of Heroes is great, with pretty decent increases at high resolutions using two 8800GT cards.

Oblivion

Our Oblivion test consists of repeatedly running along the coast to the right of the very first sewer exit. We cut across the little water inlet, jump up and over a bunch of rocks, and eventually end up jumping off a huge rock and into the water, where our 60 second recording length ends. Oblivion tests are ran at least 5 times per reported value to ensure the most representative frame rates are taken. Graphics settings are left on whatever clicking “Ultra High” in the opening options selects by default, but vsync is disabled and resolution is changed to whatever we want it to be. We do not enable AA or AF in Oblivion.


For one reason or another, the 8800GT smashes the competition in Oblivion. The performance generated by this new even trumps that of the mighty 8800GTX by quite a few four frames at 1920x1200. The recurring trend at 1600x1200 and 1280x1024 resolutions of them producing very similar results seems to suggest that the game is CPU limited at these resolutions, which is kind of a weird thing to say when you consider how damn amazing Oblivion still looks on high settings (we’ve been saying this for more than a year now… we know). SLI seems to lead to increases only at higher resolutions, where the extra graphics memory probably does wonders for the vast landscapes portrayed on screen.