Mobile SLI Gaming: CoH & Vanguard
Admittedly, there was a hint of slowdown during the crowded opening Omaha beach mission of Company of Heroes, but with everything on High or Ultra and Anti-Aliasing switched on, things soon settled down, and at no point afterwards was there a hint of jerkiness. To be honest, I've never seen the world's best-looking RTS look this damn good, with incredible detail on the individual troops once you zoom in close. My only major disappointment was S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Unfortunately, having activated my review code twice already, I was unable to install and run the game on the Xtreme SL Pro, meaning I didn't get a chance to see how well the notoriously power-hungry game would run given two GeForce Go 7950GTX processors to work with.
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Pushing all the settings to High or Ultra allowed the Xtreme Pro SL to show just how good Company of Heroes can look.
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This left one final test for the Xtreme SL Pro, and it was to prove the toughest. Vanguard’s upper-range detail systems seem to have been designed with the high-end PC of two years’ time in mind, and setting options like Tone Mapping, Grass Blending and Environmental Detail to maximum brought the frame-rate down to around 12 to 17fps, getting worse with monsters or additional players on the screen. Part of the problem may be RAM – Vanguard likes 2GB for these advanced effects to run smoothly – and I had to turn the options to merely ‘High’ with a few of the glossier effects turned off in order to get a truly playable, stable 25 to 30fps frame rate. Needless to say, the game still looks absolutely fantastic.
