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Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

What's in an X?

Before the release of the expansion, Relic's PR was very keen to point out the new technology in Opposing Fronts. DirectX 10 was again on the menu, but very little was divulged concerning the differences between the DX9 and DX10 rendering paths. Relic murmured something about better lighting and shadows, and certainly if you take a magnifying glass to the game's vehicles, the bump-mapping looks deeper and perhaps the shadows are slightly better in DirectX 10. Changing weather, a major all-new feature, looks completely identical on both DX9 and DX10 shaders. Weather was originally supposed to affect gameplay, but in the end it only shows up in some scripted events during the single-player campaign. The thunderstorms and heavy rains certainly add a lot to the game's atmosphere; it's a great feature.

Minimum graphics detail. The publisher's specified minimum system isn't quite enough to run this

Medium graphics settings - DX9 shaders, playable with the YouGamers minimum system

DirectX 10 rendering in Opposing Fronts, however, is a disappointment. For the very minor visual changes and quality improvements, the performance plummets to unplayable levels, even with the most powerful and expensive setups on the market today. It's also a case of misleading marketing: although DirectX 10 didn't make it into the game's original release, much of the post-launch hype has been about DX10 improvements. The DX10 render path introduces features like per-pixel lighting and self-shadowing to the game, features that are typically seen only in first-person shooters (but in DX9 as well). While early reviews of the DX10 patch to the original game expressed excitement about the changes, they did so after taking a magnifying glass to the game's cutscenes and the built-in benchmark. I challenge anyone to spot the difference between DX9 full graphics settings and DX10 during actual gameplay.

High graphics settings, DX9 rendering. The best combination of performance and visual quality, playable with the YouGamers recommended settings.

Ultra graphics settings, DX10 rendering. With DX10, the "Ultra" Terrain quality setting becomes available, but the only difference is a subtle change in lighting.

What do we mean when we say that performance plummets? Typical frame rates at 1920x1200 resolution, with a high-end gaming PC, are in the low teens when playing in DX10 mode. Performance suffers most with the new weather effects in Opposing Fronts on screen - which, in contrast, work perfectly well while looking the same in DX9 mode. We decided to explore just what it takes to play Opposing Fronts at high resolutions and full graphical detail in DirectX 10. The results were discouraging.

Give me 9 any day

An  Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 /  AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ provided all the processing power the game needed, and 4 GB of system memory made sure that there was no memory bottleneck. However, NVIDIA's high-end  GeForce 8800 GTX and ATI's high-end  Radeon HD 2900 XT both managed only around 30 fps on average in the game's built-in benchmark in DX10 mode, with serious frame rate drops to around 5. The same hardware setups managed to draw very smooth, almost 60 fps motion in DX9 mode, with minimum frame rates in the 25-30 region. All in all, the two high-end cards had very similar results - the DX9 mode worked great, but DX10 rendering just failed to perform.

Trying to get DX10 running well no matter what the cost, we decided to turn to dual-gpu setups. The benchmark results were chaotic; when averaged from five runs of the benchmark, two ATI Radeon HD 2900 XTs in Crossfire mode managed a 10 fps (30%) increase in average frame rate, but didn't significantly improve the jerky minimum frame rate. Two NVIDIA 8800 GTX cards in the recommended SLI mode improved performance 3 fps on average (10% increase), and minimum frame rates picked up by 5 fps (50% increase) - although subjectively the game's built-in benchmark was still very jerky at times with the SLI setup.

The built-in benchmark hasn't changed from the original Company of Heroes, so to test Opposing Fronts specifically, we ran a timed gameplay sequence (the first 120 seconds of Hexenkessel, the final mission in the Operation Market Garden campaign). This sequence features both a cutscene and actual gameplay, although the controls weren't touched during the measurement. The minimum frame rate during this sequence with both cards was 14, while the average frame rates were 25 (8800 GTX) and 30 (HD 2900 XT). Adding a second card and engaging SLI / Crossfire, we measured no performance increase whatsoever.

Although our custom gameplay measurement yielded borderline playable results, performance after a few minutes of hand-on gameplay deteriorates to unplayable levels. Moreover, the new weather effects - a major attraction in Opposing Forces - bogged down our high-end systems even further. We had to conclude that with currently available hardware, playing Opposing Fronts in DX10 mode with full graphics detail is a failed proposition.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Single-player CampaignsPage 3: MultiplayerPage 4: Graphics and Tech analysisPage 5: Final scores and Conclusion

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