Company of Heroes DirectX 10 tested

Recently a DirectX 10 patch was released for Company of Heroes. ExtremeTech decided to take a look at how the DirectX 10 mode affects quality and performance.

The first game you can actually go to a store and buy that will do something special with your DX10 graphics card turns out to be Company of Heroes, an absolutely fantastic real-time strategy game set during World War II. We use its built-in performance test in our graphics reviews all the time, because it's simply one of the most technologically advanced and downright pretty games of its type. Now the developers at Relic Entertainment have made good on their promise to support DirectX 10 with the latest patch (version 1.7). Let's kick the tires a bit to see what's new, and what it'll cost you in terms of performance..

Check it out over here. Overall they say the visual improvements in CoH's DirectX 10 mode are very small and that it causes a huge framerate drop. Framerates droped to merely a third of the DX9 mode.

Perhaps it's all we can expect from a game that doesn't use substantially different art assets for DX10 and wasn't developed all along with DX10 in mind, but it's still a bit of a letdown. The modest-but-noticeable improvement in image quality certainly doesn't seem worth the huge drop in performance.