Final Thoughts
Although we're thrilled to have an intensive new game to benchmark with, Company of Heroes fans who have invested in cutting edge hardware may be sorely disappointed with the performance they're going to get. The GeForce GTX Titan has generally awarded its owners with a free pass when it comes to quality settings – simply crank everything to its highest value and start playing – but that is no longer true thanks to Company Heroes 2.
Naturally, this was bound to happen sooner or later and we expect that most Titan owners welcomed the challenge. You'd think the solution would be to add a second Titan, but that won't get you out of trouble with Relic's latest WWII RTS. Although we didn't show SLI performance in this review, we did try it and the scaling was very poor.
It was much the same when testing Crossfire, and with no profiles for either technology we did a little digging into the subject. It turns out CoH will never feature SLI or Crossfire support – at least not without some major work. Relic has confirmed that support won't be introduced and Nvidia has said that it is powerless when it comes to adding SLI.
You also have to question whether CoH 2 should really need more than one GTX Titan for highly playable performance at 1920x1200 on maximum quality. While the game is very detailed and certainly one of the best looking RTS titles we've ever seen, we aren't convinced its visuals warrant that kind of GPU power.
Even on medium quality, when playing at 1920x1200 the performance was much lower than we expected. The GTX 680 and HD 7950 averaged just 41fps, while the more affordable GTX 660 and HD 7790 gave 28fps.
Some players might accept an average of 30fps for this title being an RTS and all, but as a huge fan of these games, I really can't enjoy them with anything less than 60fps, which is a problem with CoH 2.
The key to maximum performance seems to be a highly clocked CPU, preferably a Core i7 or Core i5, and it's no surprise that we recommend overclocking if you want to squeeze more performance out of your system, especially if you're using an i3 or anything from AMD. While the FX-8350 performed well, i5 chips such as the i5-3470 gave much more bang, though if you plan to play with maximum quality then your GPU will probably create a bottleneck before your CPU anyway.
Unfortunately, we're a little disappointed with the results overall as CoH 2 seems far too demanding for what it is. Furthermore, for a game that requires such a tremendous amount of graphical power, its lack of multi-GPU support feels like a serious blunder to us.