XFX 7950GT
8. Company Of Heroes
In Company of Heroes, gamers will experience the journey of the brave men of Able Company in a deep single-player campaign that begins with the invasion of Normandy through their fight across Europe, all set against the most dynamic battlefield ever seen in a game.
Company of Heroes' completely destructable environment means no two battles ever play out in the same way. Advanced squad AI delivers startling new realism and responsiveness, bringing soldiers to life as they interact with the environment and execute advanced squad tactics to eliminate the opposition forces.
The game offers impressive graphics. We used the built-in benchmark for all tests. Due to various performance visual settings, we chose four quality modes (Ultra, High, Medium, Low) at 1280x1024 resolution. Each quality mode setting is posted above each graph for your reference.
- Ultra Mode
In this mode, all quality settings are at maximum and Antialising is enabled. This is the worst case scenario for your card but if it can handle it, it offers the best visual effects.
- High Mode
In this mode, all quality settings are at maximum except for Antialising which is disabled.
- Medium Mode
In this mode, most quality settings are set to medium, while others are disabled altogether.
- Low Mode
In this mode, most quality settings are set to low, and others are disabled.
After having seen the settings we used for our tests, let's see how each card performed in the Company Of Heroes Benchmark with Ultra Quality settings.
Strangely, the 7950GT and 7900GS cards performed exactly the same, at least in the average framerate. The 7950GT had a higher minimum framerate (15 vs 11.8) but we cannot understand why the average performance was at the same levels.
Passing from Ultra to High (anti-aliasing disabled), does give somewhat higher FPS, but not too much. What is rather interesting is that even our 7900GS SLI doesn't offer much higher performance, as we would expect. Disabling several visual improvements, give much higher framerates, with the 7900SLI setup really taking off. With all visual settings, the 7950GT had lower performance than the 7900GS, which is a little puzzling...