The bundled game was an excellent choice as THQ's Company of Heroes is one of the most fun games I've ever played, World War II setting notwithstanding. It is also the perfect benchmarking tool with its included performance test and the fact that it's an incredibly demanding game. Plus, being that the 8800 cards are fully DirectX 10-ready and that there is a DX10 patch in the works for Company of Heroes, it was arguably the perfect bundle choice.
Setting the engine to the below values and running the performance test at both 2560x1600 and 1920x1200, some very surprisingly results were harvested.
Company of Heroes Engine Settings
The 640MB GTS was tested three times before it was switched out for the 320MB GTS and after the 320MB GTS was tested three times at each set of clock speeds, the 640MB GTS was reinstalled and retested a fourth time just to make sure the below results were not some sort of fluke.
Company of Heroes Benchmarks
The performance was absolutely unbelievable with the 320MB GTS. The maximum framerate more than doubled at both resolutions and even more impressive gains were made across the board at 1920x1200. Triple checking left these staggering results vindicated and further proof in the form of near-identical results from an outside source confirmed that my results were not a fluke.
The results from MSI's overclock on the card as well as the more aggressive overclock I achieved, along with outside evidence from forum member TiKiMaN1 in this thread make me wonder if the engine behind Company of Heroes was somehow designed with different "performance tiers." What I mean is that when the game is launched, the engine takes a general look at system specs: CPU speed, memory amount/speed, graphics card memory amount/speed and GPU speed and sets a maximum performance limit for the engine based on those numbers. A bracket, if you will. In that bracket, there is a maximum framerate the at which the game can perform, even if the system has more power to offer. As soon as one or more of the components are running at clock speed faster than what the bracket is looking for, the game bumps up to the next bracket allowing for higher/better performance since it assumes that the computer can handle it.
I don't know if that is how the game actually works. However, it is the only explanation that seems to make any sense, especially since all TiKi did was increase his CPU 100MHz and his results went through the roof.
