Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
We ran Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts with both DX9 and DX10 code-paths. Detail was set to maximum. Do note that this is a TWIMTBP title.
Our architectural assumptions are borne out by the performance of the Radeon HD 3870 against the Radeon HD 2900 XT. Both cards produce near-identical frame rates. The extra shading and texturing power of the HD 3870 - thanks to faster clocks - is able to compensate for the apparent lack of memory bandwidth.
A CrossFire set up sees a nice boost in performance, as well. Frame rates are smooth at 1920x1200 4xAA. However, NVIDIA's GeForce 8800 GT is able to out-muscle both Radeon cards - quite easily, in fact - and beats out the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 handily, too. But we've not published numbers for the GeForce 8800 GTS 320 at the highest resolution due to the card consistently crashing.
DX10
Running the DX10 path adds a little extra graphical pomp but at considerable expense to frame rates - all cards suffering. Again, the Radeon HD 3870 is able to match the HD 2900 XT yet both are bested by GeForce 8800 GT power. Looking at the comparatively poor performance of the GeForce 8800 GTS 320, we can surmise that its limited frame buffer - 320MiB - is being swamped rather too quickly.
SLI-produced numbers using the DX10 path were hugely variable, with a difference of upto 25 per cent between runs at the 1920x1200 setting. We encountered similar, albeit less extreme, variance with the Radeon cards in CrossFire.
Considered on a card-for-card basis, round one goes comfortably to the GeForce 8800 GT 512.
