Feature Articles

Company of Hereos: Patch 1.3 Rescues SLI!

By Vijay Anand - 3 Dec 2006

Setting FSAA Options Right in COH & Conclusion

Setting FSAA Options Right in COH

Apart from relating performance figures, we thought some of you might benefit on how to best set FSAA settings given that there are controls in both the game and the driver control panel. This is because the method of engaging anti-aliasing in the brand new GeForce 8 series in their latest drivers and that of the GeForce 7 series is slightly different. After our trails and tests, here's what we've finalized and should work well:-

GeForce 8 Series and Drivers

The new drivers tailored for the GeForce 8 series come with very explicit settings to set the desired quality and gaming performance precisely. In the context of anti-aliasing, the driver has an "Override any application setting" option so it doesn't really matter what the in-game options are, though setting the in-game anti-aliasing option to Disabled is recommended.

For the GeForce 8 series, if you require precise anti-aliasing control, use the advanced options in the driver control panel to set "Override any application setting" option and then select the desired anti-aliasing level. In this case and in our tests, we've opted to use 4x AA.

GeForce 7 Series or older cards and Drivers

For enabling FSAA in GeForce 7 series or older cards, the drivers aren't the same as those in GeForce 8 and this requires another approach to successfully enable FSAA properly. First, ensure that the in-game options has anti-aliasing enabled - this is important (apparently, the graphics driver control panel's options don't override the game's settings if AA was set to Disable within the game). Then proceed to the driver control panel and enable FSAA to your desired AA level. That's it. COH will now run with AA as intended.

For GeForce 7 cards and earlier, check that the game's AA setting is enabled.

Then enter the driver control panel and set the required AA settings. COH will now run with anti-aliasing as intended by the user.

Concluding Comments

What more can we say? SLI finally works for Company of Heroes and that should really put some smiles back to those who went out to upgrade to an SLI solution and for those contemplating upon it. Interestingly, the GeForce 8800 GTS in SLI doesn't perform as appealing as it suggests in really taxing settings. So if one needs better performance or foresees the need to go beyond the capability of the GTS model, it's best to invest a little more for the GeForce 8800 GTX. We'll see if our recommendation holds true for other games as well, but we'll save that for another dedicated article (so do look forward to that).

Additionally, we've also showed you the right method of enabling anti-aliasing for COH, so do make a mental note of it if for some reason anti-aliasing doesn't seem to live up to your expectations. However, COH isn't bug free yet as we couldn't get CrossFire working with dual Radeon X1950 XTX cards. CrossFire setup is rather straightforward, so for it not to work isn't much of a science to solve on our end. We could only hope that Relic and ATI (AMD) is able to solve the game's dual graphics support quickly. So for ATI users, you'll have to keep your fingers crossed meanwhile.

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