X-bit labs

Seven Friends of a Gamer: GPUs vs. Games Spring 2007 (page 6)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 03/30/2007 | 12:55 PM ]

Performance in Company of Heroes

We go over from shooters to strategies now. And we do so very smoothly because Company of Heroes belongs to the tactical RTS genre, but features visuals of a good 3D shooter. The rich visuals have not been developed at the expense of the strategic aspect of the game, though. Company of Heroes takes into account such subtleties as the difference in the thickness of a tank’s front and side armor, the arcs of fire of gun crews and machinery, etc. Such things are sure to please a true admirer of the genre.

Unfortunately, the game refused to run with enabled 4x FSAA at the Ultra graphics quality settings. We decided the matter in favor of the highest level of detail and benchmarked the cards in Company of Heroes with anisotropic filtering only.

Premium/High-End Class

First place belongs to the GeForce 8800 GTX, just like in the previous cases. Nvidia’s flagship product is fast enough for you to be able to play this game at a resolution of 1920x1200 pixels. This is good news for people who have got modern monitors with a large diagonal.

Despite its two G71 processors the GeForce 7950 GX2 loses this round to the single-processor Radeon X1950 XTX which has as many pixel processors but is free from the inherent drawbacks of multi-GPU technologies. At the same time, GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB demonstrated performance level comparable with that of Radeon X1950 XTX. However, all three cards delivered excellent performance in 1600x1200 resolution. If you’ve got any of them and don’t want to upgrade, and if your monitor does not support display resolutions above 1600x1200 or 1680x1050, you can play Company of Heroes comfortably with the highest possible graphics quality settings.

Performance-Mainstream Class

All the graphics cards in this category, except for the GeForce 7900 GS, which should rather be regarded as a Mainstream product now, deliver acceptable performance at a resolution of 1280x1024. Having a well-balanced specification, the AMD Radeon X1900 XT deservedly takes first place, even leaving the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB behind.

Both, Radeon X1950 Pro and the GeForce 7950 cards, provide comfortable average gaming speeds in 1280x1024 resolution. The AMD solution is even somewhat faster than the Nvidia fellow.

Mainstream Class

These results can hardly please owners of Mainstream graphics cards. It is clear that neither the GeForce 7900 GS nor the Radeon X1650 Pro, let alone the GeForce 7600 GT, can ensure fully comfortable gameplay here. Although the average speed of the Radeon X1650 XT is rather high, the minimum speed is below 10fps. It means slowdowns and loss of control accuracy which is no less important for a real-time strategy than for a first-person shooter.