Company of Heroes 2 Tested, Benchmarked

[Guest]

I'm sorry but this is a awful benchmark. You do realize that setting Anti-Aliasing to anything other than Low uses SSAA right? It doubles your resolution then scales it down, pretty much rendering TWO images at once.

Set AA to low, max everything else out and all these high end cards will run the game no problem. You guys are incredibly unprofessional when it comes to your benchmarks.

 

[Guest]

The last poster (@Guest) is spot on ... and very diplomatic for using the word unprofessional rather than many others they could have chosen!

I read this and thought that I was going to be in trouble, as I'm running with a stock HD 6970 and stock i7 950 @ 3.07Ghz. The stats show that when running at maximum I should expect 17 fps based on 1920 x 1200. Then I also realised that they had also set AA to High! SSAA (Super Sampling) does exactly what the previous poster says; uses the highest quality sample and then reduces it down to size.[FONT=Verdana][/FONT]

I actually have a 1920 x 1200 display as well, so I fit the bill perfectly in terms of these benchmarks. I consistently got 28 fps when running the CoH 2 benchmark. I had hoped for more, but that's fine for playing the game properly. I've never seen a benchmark go straight in there for Highest AA when showing comparisons! Given the way that the test has been constructed, that's like rendering Jurassic Park in real-time on your gaming rig!

The discovery of 4 cores being used as a maximum is useful and important, but I'm afraid that the overriding GPU tests are flawed because a lack of understanding on the AA front.

 

[St1ckM4n]

A fix could be detailed here:

http://www.kotaku.com.au/2013/07/company-of-heroes-2-running-like-garbage-this-tweak-might-help/


Would be interesting to see HDD usage which gaming.

 

[Guest]

I too was quite surprised to see that the review didn't really get into the details of the graphics settings. (Did they even tell precisely which settings were used?)
By playing around a few minutes I quickly found out that AA was the key to OK frame rates.
On my i5 750 @ 4Ghz, 8GB DDR3 1600, 7950 @ 1050 (RAM stock 1250) Low AA is essentially free but going just to medium had a huge impact on frames:
No AA: 55.7 - Low AA: 54.5 - Medium AA: 41.2 - High AA: 30.3
Other than that, snow detail is quite expensive as well.
But yes, CPU speed IS very important. Can't remember frames at the 750's stock speed @ 2.66, but they were quite a bit lower.

PS. I am not the "original" guest poster

 

[Guest]

Guest "2" here again. Just to elaborate further on the AA thing:
Actually the most important bench on RTS is in my opinion lowest frame rates which on my system were
35.8 on No AA
35.6 on Low AA
22.3 on Medium AA
13.2 on high AA

That's almost cutting frame rates in half every time you raise the AA setting.....

 

[Guest]

According to semiaccurate.com the included benchmark is crap and shows much lower frame rates than what to expect during normal game play though out the game.
odd move of relic fooling their customers
@mr. techspot: better redo all tetsting again using fraps

 

[popeye6212]

YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME ON AN I3 All day long. I know cause I have. 3.4ghz i3 with gtx ram video card, 6GB ram 64bit windows 8. I play at 1920x1080 everything set to low (not minimum) and it runs nice and smooth even in 8 player matchs online. The graphics still look great. IDK why everyone is pissed, they made a game that will get better looking as technology improves. I hate when I buy a game and I can just max it out. Also the built in benchmark is supposed to demonstrate worst case scenario, and your actual matchs will almost always have better frame rates. Relic built it as a stress test. Yesh the coding in the game isn't great but you definitly don't need an i7 and a Titan to enjoy the game with acceptable frame rates.

 

[popeye6212]

*gtx 460 (1GB vram)

 

[GhostRyder]

YOU CAN PLAY THIS GAME ON AN I3 All day long. I know cause I have. 3.4ghz i3 with gtx ram video card, 6GB ram 64bit windows 8. I play at 1920x1080 everything set to low (not minimum) and it runs nice and smooth even in 8 player matchs online. The graphics still look great. IDK why everyone is pissed, they made a game that will get better looking as technology improves. I hate when I buy a game and I can just max it out. Also the built in benchmark is supposed to demonstrate worst case scenario, and your actual matchs will almost always have better frame rates. Relic built it as a stress test. Yesh the coding in the game isn't great but you definitly don't need an i7 and a Titan to enjoy the game with acceptable frame rates.

Your missing the point, this is not a game like crisis where it was due to the high demands of the game that you cant play it, while this game is demanding, its inefficient.

It only truly utilizes 2 Core when 4 cores is the standard in todays games and programs which heavily limits is usage.
It does poor to no support in SLI/CFX meaning that your forced to 1 GPU to actually use the game (in which even the titan does have issues)
The game while looking decent does not look like a game deserving of need this much power and that's the main issue.

You maybe satisfied with running a game on low, but not everyone things that way, I for instance like at least high-Ultra and im not the only one who thinks it. The fact is, the developers were lazy at making this game efficient for everyone to use and expand on, the fact that even overclocking hits a point where the game stops scaling shows this as well which is very disheartening to many of us who have FX or i7 Processors heavily overclocked expecting higher FPS.

 

[popeye6212]

Here are some benchmarks I did on friends machines and mine.

[FONT=Times New Roman]Cpu: I3 2130 @ 3.4Ghz (no OC)[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]Video: GTX 460[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]Ram: 6GB[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]OS: Windows 8 64bit[/FONT]

Settings are:
1920X1080
Gameplay Resolution: 100% (Max setting)
Image Quality: Low
AA: Off
V sync: On
Snow Detail: Low
Texture Detail: Low
Physics: High (Max setting)

Avg Frame Rate: 31.24

These are not the lowest settings. Image quality can be set to minimum, and game play resolution can be set down to 33%.

My brother rocks a Core 2 quad and a GTX 470 these are his settings and results:

[FONT=Times New Roman]Cpu: Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 2.83Ghz (no OC)[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]Video: GTX 470[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]Ram: 4GB DDR3[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman]OS: Windows 7 64bit[/FONT]

1920X1080
Gameplay Resolution: 100% (Max setting)
Image Quality: Medium
AA: Off
V sync: On
Texure Detail: High
Snow Detail: Medium
Physics: High (Max setting)

Average Frame Rate: 30.58

The graphics look very good and the gameplay is excellent and that's on a core 2 quad with him running a mix of medium and high settings

The way they executed the benchmarks for this game is ridiculous, Who would turn there AA to medium when there graphic textures are only set to medium?


Here's on my I5, with my new R9 280x, which is basically a rebadged 7970 GHZ Edition

[FONT=times new roman]Cpu: I5 3570k @ 3.4ghz (no OC)[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman]Video: R9 280x[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman]Ram: 16GB[/FONT]
[FONT=times new roman]OS:Windows 7 64bit[/FONT]

Benchmark Settings
1920X1080 (they did 1920x1200)
Gameplay Resolution: 100% (Max setting)
Image Quality: Maximum
AA: High (Max setting)
V sync: Off
Texure Detail: Maximum
Snow Detail: High (Max setting)
Physics: High (Max setting)

Frame Rate Avg: 36.92

I Did about 4 frames better than their 7970Ghz Edition and this is possibly due to my resolution being 1920X1080 instead of their 1920x1200.

Benched it again Everything set to max but AA set to low

Benchmark Settings:
1920X1080
Gameplay Resolution: 100% (Max setting)
Image Quality: Maximum
AA: Low
V sync: Off
Texure Detail: Maximum
Snow Detail: High (Max setting)
Physics: High (Max setting)

Average Frame Rate: 54.56

At these setting during gameplay FRAPS generally shows my fps between 70 and 80. Occasionally it'll drop down to 50s during intense action but I can't really perceive the difference.

Anyway this game is quite playable on hardware that is lower than anything they even tested. I think the Core 2 quad system with the GTX 470 is a great example of a somewhat older game computer. The fact that it runs a mix of medium, high and maximum settings shows that this game isn't as inefficient as there benchmarks make it appear. If you got to have max everything including AA and 60fps better go get yourself a TItan. If you're more interested in playing the game than setting everything to max then you should have no problem on any recent machine with a half decent video card.

 

[Guest]

@Guest#2

Low AA is FXAA, aka poor man's AA. It's cheap, but makes textures blurry, so best avoided, if possible.

Mid AA is 2xSSAA (Super-Sampled Anti-Aliasing), which draws every polygon twice, hence increasing the workload significantly.

High AA is 4xSSAA which is twice the work of 2xSSAA.

The reason this game turned out the way it did was because the developer's (Relic's) parent company THQ had gone bankrupt at a very inconvenient time, and Relic, like all of THQ's assets, was up for bidding and was eventually bought by SAGA. There was a time of several weeks during which the Relic staff probably had no idea what was going to happen to their jobs. Perhaps SAGA should have given them some more time to adjust to the change.

 

[Adder]

I'm confused. I just purchased an MSI i7-3630qm 2.40 / 8gb ram / geforce 660m / w8
and the frame rate on CoH2 (with everything set to low/off) is so abysmally slow that something seems wrong - I'm talking maybe 10 fps. Would anyone be able to shed some light on this for me ?

 

[Puiu]

I'm confused. I just purchased an MSI i7-3630qm 2.40 / 8gb ram / geforce 660m / w8
and the frame rate on CoH2 (with everything set to low/off) is so abysmally slow that something seems wrong - I'm talking maybe 10 fps. Would anyone be able to shed some light on this for me ?

what resolution? 1080p is not easy for a laptop depending on the game.

 

[Adder]

Confusingly when I open the options panel within the main menu the resolution box is empty, so I'm unable to either see or change it. I guess it's running in whatever default mode is set by the game.

I've updated my drivers. I see that other players are getting at least 30 fps with older systems, so it leaves me scratching my head.

I appreciate the help Puiu

 

[GhostRyder]

Confusingly when I open the options panel within the main menu the resolution box is empty, so I'm unable to either see or change it. I guess it's running in whatever default mode is set by the game.

I've updated my drivers. I see that other players are getting at least 30 fps with older systems, so it leaves me scratching my head.

I appreciate the help Puiu

Make sure the game is running in full screen mode might be a good start and also that its actually defaulting to the Nividia Driver. I have had an issue before on my MSI GT70 in CoH2 where it for wahtever reason was not defaulting to the GTX 675m and instead was running on the HD 4000 on-board GPU. MSI afterburner can also help shed some light if you want to check your in-game FPS while playing and it will also display if your GPU is being used correctly.

 

[Guest]

I've installed Afterburner and it looks like everything is okay.

I'm not sure how I can dictate that the game launches uses my geforce though - there are a couple of config files in the game folder but whenever I tweak values and try to save, it tells me 'denied'. Without that, I can't alter the resolution or anything else. I can't believe I haven't figured this out yet, man I'm so out of touch. Take me back to the mid 90's.

 

[Puiu]

Try some compatibility modes. also check for bios updates.