Benchmark Results: Company of Heroes
This one is no contest at all. Nvidia crushes AMD, with a single GeForce GTX 280 at 2560x1600 trouncing a four-way CrossFireX configuration at 1920x1200.
It doesn’t really matter if you go Core i7 or Core 2 Extreme—both GTX 280-equipped setups dominate. However, we again see the Core i7 965 Extreme realizing an extra bit of performance that wasn’t available on Core 2.
This isn’t to say the Radeons are somehow “broken” in Company of Heroes. We still see scaling from one GPU to two and four. However, it’s much less pronounced than the gains realized by competing cards, and thus looks less significant on the same chart. The good news is that even a single Radeon HD 4870 is playable at 1920x1200 on any of our AMD-equipped machines. Graphics is holding up performance here, though, not processing power—a fact reflected by the Phenom’s ability to hang right with Intel’s high-end solutions.
In a nearly mirror image of what we saw in the previous chart, Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280s exert a commanding lead with anti-aliasing turned on. We hesitate to call the detail setting “free.” However, when you’re using three of Nvidia’s highest-end boards in an array of power-sucking cooperation, there is a minimal performance drop when the feature is turned on. Wait—scratch that. You actually gain performance when it’s enabled on a Core i7 system.
Once again, the Radeon HD 4870s run into a brick wall at about 57 FPS and simply cannot do any better. Yes, vsync was forced off in the drivers.
Perhaps even more amazing than AMD’s poor showing in this title is that turning on 8x anti-aliasing actually buys extra speed, with the exception of the 512 MB card’s attempt at 2560x1600. We’re thinking that something is terribly wrong in the latest Catalyst driver since these issues were manifest in testing with the shipping 8.10 set (790FX) and the very latest beta hotfix released to improve performance on X58.
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I'm waiting for X58 Skulltrail and a couple of Quadro CX boards - eat THAT CS4!!
Why weren't the GTX's paired with the Phenom just for fun eh?
Great article!
This is the first great article I've seen here for some time. Keep up the good work. I'd like to see a similar comparison further down the ranges - maybe with 9800GT tri sli and HD4830 crossfire.
Besides this article giving a lot of good information it also gives us a nice future glance on what a real gamer is going to need in de near future. the i7 + a dual gpu is the best choice for high resolutions and no matter who makes it, nvidia or amd/ati. thats great news for us as end users!
Great article...but I was wondering about the difference between the x58 and x48 platforms....I may have missed it but did you mention if hyper threading was enabled on the core i7 platform....possibly the reason for the increased performance?
It would be interesting to see if hyper threading gives any extra games performance.
enabling it does actually increase power consumption and consequently heat production. This will be an important consideration for overclockers so we really need to know if hyperthreading gives any actual game performance increase
can't wait until early 2009....lucid logix should be releasing their hydra soc system for multi gpu....100% gpu scaling for both nvidia and ati...put that on a x58 board....wow gamers heaven
That's a great article, I really enjoyed it! And a really big chunk of useful data too. You must have spend quite a few days running all those benchmarks. Thanks for all the hard work and once again well done on a great article.