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Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts

Conclusion

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts introduces some very interesting things. We now have a major WWII title where you can play a single-player campaign from the German forces' perspective, and the result is both tactful and top quality. It's also a technological pioneer, as the June 2007 updates that added DX10 rendering made Company of Heroes the world's first DX10 title. Unfortunately, this only wins Opposing Fronts the much less honorable distinction of being a marketing crutch for the new graphics technology.

Performance analysis shows that the new shader calculations in Relic's DX10 renderer are too demanding for current top of the line video cards. When trying to break this bottleneck with dual video cards, Opposing Fronts seems to be missing even the small benefit that Company of Heroes gets from SLI or Crossfire. This suggests that new graphics technologies like DirectX 10 can negate or detract from the performance benefits of other technologies like dual card rendering support.

The units are highly detailed - too bad the engine can't handle zooming in and changing the camera angle without stalling

Holy texture mess Batman! There are times the cutscene director asks too much of the in-game engine

Game developers have to build their engines specifically to take advantage of the latest technology. So far, World in Conflict is the only example of a high performance DX10 engine, and even then the results aren't radically different from DX9 rendering. During normal gameplay in Opposing Forces, you can only see the differences between DX10 and DX9 with a magnifying glass. Luckily, thanks to the dismal performance in DX10, you can do frame-to-frame comparisons in real time!

Technically, Opposing Fronts is pretty much the same game as the original Company of Heroes, as long as you forget about DX10. While procedurally generated additional "litter" objects, Direct3D 10 shaders and a new lighting model sound great, the new stuff in Opposing Fronts isn't ready for prime time. The engine is still very limited - the action stutters when you change the camera angle, so that for smooth gameplay your only option is to keep the camera in the default angle. Let's hope this first foray into DX10 acts as a good primer course for the developers at Relic, and their next engine comes out more mature and capable than the Essence engine ever was.

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

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

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