Company Of Heroes

Resolution Comparison

It's amazing. In Company Of Heroes (DirectX 9 render path), the new NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT was actually 3% faster than the far more expensive GeForce 8800 GTX at 1280 x 1024. The GeForce 8800 GTX only pulled away at the higher resolutions where it was 4.4% faster at 1600 x 1200 and 7.8% faster at 1920 x 1200.

Even at the highest resolution we tested (1920 x 1200), the mid-range GeForce 8800 GT managed to deliver an amazing frame rate of 99 fps. That's 7.7% faster than the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT which costs about twice as much. It was also about 70% faster than the GeForce 8600 GTS running at the lower resolution of 1280 x 1024. Truly amazing performance for a mid-range enthusiast-grade graphics card.

Anti-Aliasing Comparison

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT was somewhere between the performance of the GeForce 8800 GTX and the Radeon HD 2900 XT in anti-aliasing performance. Generally, it was able to run at one anti-aliasing mode lower than the GeForce 8800 GTX and one mode higher than the Radeon HD 2900 XT while achieving the same frame rate.

Going all the way up to the maximum mode of 16xQ AA only sapped its frame rate by 54.4%. At 16xQ AA and a resolution of 1920 x 1200, the GeForce 8800 GT was still able to deliver an incredible frame rate of 45 fps. That's just 15% slower than the GeForce 8800 GTX.

DirectX Comparison

Switching from the DirectX 9 render path to DirectX 10 saw a massive drop (50-55%) in frame rate for all NVIDIA graphics cards in the comparison. The sole ATI graphics card, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT saw a larger drop in frame rate of 61-66% when we switched to the DirectX 10 render path.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT remained close behind the GeForce 8800 GTX in performance at all resolutions. The difference in frame rate was only about 4-9%. It was however, significantly faster than the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. In fact, in DirectX 10, the GeForce 8800 GT running at the resolution of 1920 x 1200 was actually faster than the Radeon HD 2900 XT running at the much lower resolution of 1280 x 1024.