Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes Performance 1600x1200x32
Card	Min FPS	Max FPS
GeForce 8800 Ultra DX10	10.7	62.9
GeForce 8800 Ultra DX9	38.6	151
GeForce 8800 GTX SLI DX10	19.6	59.9
GeForce 8800 GTX SLI DX9	69.7	273.4
GeForce 8800 GTX DX10	10.7	60.2
GeForce 8800 GTX DX9	31.9	139.5
GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI DX10	16	54.4
GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB SLI DX9	63.6	256
GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB DX10	8.6	55.7
GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB DX9	20.7	62.1
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI DX10	11.4	56.4
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI DX9	13.3	62.5
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB DX10	9.9	53.6
GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB DX9	24	60.3
Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire DX10	2.9	49
Radeon HD 2900 XT CrossFire DX9	69.1	226
Radeon HD 2900 XT DX10	7.5	50
Radeon HD 2900 XT DX9	17	141.5
Diamond 2900 XT 1GB DX10	3.4	46.8
Diamond 2900 XT 1GB DX9	19.8	76.4

Notes

Company of Heroes was the first game to be patched to support DX10, with the 1.7 patch being delivered at the end of May. The game’s DX10 path offers improved lighting, grass, and additional litter objects – random objects such as rocks are strewn across the environment. We’re using the game’s built-in benchmark here.

As you can see, performance takes a significant hit in CoH once DX10 is enabled. For single-card configs, DX10 performance is roughly half that of DX9, while SLI systems see a performance hit of 4X. The GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB card doesn’t have enough memory to run the game’s ultra settings with 4xAA at 2560x1600, which is why those results are left blank.

Company of Heroes is another game that shows good SLI scaling, although in the case of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, CrossFire only scales under the DX9 path – DX10 performance is practically identical to the single Radeon 2900 XT card.

The GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB SLI config performs similar to the single GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB. We asked NVIDIA about this and they think the memory slowdown issue is what’s causing this. Turning the texture setting down to medium resolved this. Hopefully this is an issue NVIDIA can resolve in a future driver.

The Radeon HD 2900 XT cards continue to perform poorly under DX10 in this title, although you can see the 2900 XT pulls ahead of the GTS in this game under DX9, falling just 5% shy of the GeForce 8800 GTX at 1600x1200.