Company of Heroes Benchmark Results

Company of Heroes is Relic's first title to make use of a new type of engine, known as the "Essence Engine". This engine was designed and coded from scratch by Relic in order to make use of special graphical effects, including high dynamic range lighting, dynamic lighting & shadows, advanced shader effects and normal mapping. COH is rendered in 3D with intricate detailing on the infantry, vehicles and structures while still retaining a solid frame-rate, without, Relic claims, the need for a high-end gaming system. It claims that there are nearly 2,000 different animations for a basic infantry unit alone.

Company of Heroes also utilizes the Havok 3 physics engine, giving it a more realistic physics system than previous RTS games. Parts of buildings can be destroyed by grenades, satchels or mortars, and tanks can drive through sections of walls or other barriers. Smoke created from explosions is programmed to behave as realistically as possible and can even be influenced by wind. Debris is also influenced by explosions; a blast can send barrels flying and shower troops in dirt, whilst leaving behind a large crater. When infantry are bombarded by artillery, body parts sometimes detach and are dispersed over, and some units even getting thrown about in the immediate area. Bridges and buildings can be destroyed by engineers using demolitions.

In our first series of benchmarks for Company of Heroes (v2.201.0), the ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT performed nearly identical to the older GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. At 1024x768 resolution, there should be a much larger disparity between test results. At the lower resolutions, a game that is more GPU dependant than CPU dependant will show favor to these results. This was the first piece of evidence that an GT could beat out a GTX in real world gaming.

There might be more explanations, but I can only think of two possibilities:

1. The Essence engine in CoH doesn't stress the 8800 series of video cards like other games, especially since all graphics cards down to the NVIDIA GeForce3/Ti series are supported by the game.
2. THQ and Relic have optimized the game (there have been countless patches) to use a maximum frame rate and thus restrict the results to a more narrow range.

At any rate, the ZOTAC GeForce 8800 GT 512MB does show that a minor performance difference over the overclocked GeForce 8800 GTS and GTX, even if CoH makes it look much less than it is. In our next benchmark tests, World in Conflict offers a more contrasting view between the three video cards.

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