Company of Heroes: a brilliant PC game lacking in technical ambition

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Digital Foundry delivers its verdict - and optimised settings, of course - for Company of Heroes 3 on PC:

Another indication of a more conservative approach to innovation is the novel use of the latest cutting-edge technology. The original Company of Heroes was one of the first DX10 games, using the new API to improve shadow and lighting quality while punishing GPUs at launch with the highest settings. Company of Heroes 2 was infamous in 2013 as its DX11-powered graphics were similarly heavy when set to their highest. This kind of graphical newness is missing in Company of Heroes 3.

Optimised settings? There's an argument that you don't really need them as the options concentrate mostly on graphical effects when the primary bottleneck is often on the CPU side. It's easily possible to be CPU-bound in Company of Heroes 3, even at 4K resolution. When you look at that CPU utilisation, the game is using a lot of cores and threads with all the other AI players, but you can still see that there is a single-threaded limit to the load.

Even so, it's still possible to get high performance levels from mainstream kit, which is a good thing, or else you can target high frame-rates instead, to get the best from a high refresh rate monitor. On this page, you'll see my suggestions for various frame-rate targets, using a mainstream Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an RTX 2060 Super asiming for a 1440p output.

The game runs really well even at max settings, but there's still the sense that the developer should have pushed further on the GPU side: RT shadows and ambient occlusion would have made a big difference to the presentation. In short, I wasn't disappointed by the game - and I'm sure the light GPU requirements will ensure that more players get a smooth experience - but where prior series entries pushed new boundaries within the genre, Company of Heroes 3 does not.

 

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