X-bit labs

The Second Encounter: DirectX 10 Games vs. Contemporary Graphics Accelerators (page 9)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 10/26/2007 | 02:20 PM ]

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

The ATI Radeon HD 2900 series is about as fast as in the original game while Nvidia’s products have got faster. The GeForce 8800 GTX gains the lead now.

Anyway, the problem of low minimum performance of every graphics card persists and has even become worse. Having good average speeds none of the cards can keep the minimum of speed even at 20fps.

Of course, there is no playing comfort when you have slowdowns from 30-40fps to 6-10fps, but all the tested graphics cards had a more or less acceptable average speed at 1280x1024.

When we enable full-screen antialiasing, every card slows down heavily. The GeForce 8800 GTX and the GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB are the only cards to keep above 30fps. The reserve of speed is much lower now than if you use only anisotropic filtering.

So, the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX seems to be the best choice for playing Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts in DirectX 10 mode but the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT 1GB doesn’t look much worse. It’s hard to find the best one among the cheaper cards: the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT and the Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB are equals. The GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB is definitely preferable to the Radeon HD 2900 Pro unless you overclock them.