Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts DX9

Company of Heroes has always been one of our favorite RTS games with visceral firefights and a gripping campaign. Opposing Fronts is the expansion to this great game and it introduces players to British campaign to liberate France from German occupation in the weeks and months following D-Day.

[i]PLEASE NOTE WE HAVE COMPLETELY CHANGED OUR CoH TESTING. We are now using a single mission (Authie: Boudica's Boys from the British Campaign) since after extensive testing we came to the realization that the in-game benchmark is highly inaccurate and does not reflect in-game performance at all. Thus, we have taken the Authie mission since it holds a bit of everything the game has to offer: vehicle battles, thundering arty barrages and house-to-house fighting. We recorded framerates using FRAPS up until the 15 minute mark of the mission and skilling any in-game briefings / cutscenes.



Without AA turned on there doesn’t seem to be any problem for every card to render acceptable frame rates in this game. However, when we turned on AA we see the telltale sign that there are driver issues with the 9800 GX2 and the GTX 280 is able to surge ahead at 2560 x 1600 resolution. This is a great illustration of why a single GPU solution is so much more appealing than a hodge-podge on board SLI interconnect.


Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts DX10


We should mention right away that Nvidia is aware of the abysmal performance of the 9800 GX2 in CoH DX10 and was taking steps to improve it even before we brought it to their attention. This is exactly why we choose to bench in-game here since the default benchmark in this game gave no clue as to the poor performance of some of the leading cards.

Driver issues seems to be the name of the game with all the Nvidia cards including the GTX 280 without AA turned on but once again it surges ahead when the eye candy is unleashed.