Last month we showed DirectX 10 performance on Call of Juarez and Lost Planet: Extreme Condition and showed that NVIDIA was leading ATI when it came to DirectX10 performance. This past week THQ Inc. released a patch adding Microsoft DirectX 10 support to PC game title Company of Heroes. This makes Company of Heroes is the first commercially available DirectX 10 Windows PC game and we have been busy benchmarking it over the last couple days to bring you some performance numbers on the latest and greatest DX10 video cards from both ATI and NVIDIA.
The Company of Heroes v1.7 patch adds DirectX 10 features to the original game. In the patch release notes it mentions the following for DX10 features.* Edges of particles are softened where intersecting 3D objects.
* Thousands of additional 'litter' objects in the world.
* Improved user control over anti aliasing settings.
* Alpha to coverage anti aliasing to improve quality of alpha test objects such as shrubs.
* Lighting quality has improved by moving all calculations per pixel.
* More precise point light calculations.
* Point lights can now cast shadows.
* 3D short grass on the terrain.
* Vertical refresh synchronization is enabled by default to improve visual quality
* Hardware PCF for improved shadow quality.
DX9
http://www.legitreviews.com/images/revi ... oh_dx9.jpg
DX10
http://www.legitreviews.com/images/revi ... h_dx10.jpg
DirectX 10 instancing has improved flexibility, allowing for instanced objects to use different textures and shaders. Even in ordinary scenes like this one, many more objects can be drawn with little CPU overhead. This is just one example of how DirectX 10 will visually look different. Let's get to the testing to see how these video cards do with the new DirectX 10 patch.


The Legit Bottom Line: The Company of Heroes DirectX 10 patch is finally here! The ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT doesn't have enough muscle to beat out the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB in Company of Heroes when using the latest drivers from both companies.
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/507/1/








