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Dawn of War II Gameplay Performance and IQ

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is here, sporting an updated Company of Heroes graphics engine! Join us as we examine this well-received strategy game using six of the most current video cards around today!

Introduction

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II was published on February 21, 2009 by Relic Entertainment and THQ. It is based upon the Warhammer 40,000 tabletop miniature war game created by Games Workshop in 1987. In the tabletop game, players assemble armies of small and often elaborately painted pewter figurines to slug it out in a variety of environments, with battles taking hours or even days to play out.

The Warhammer 40K takes place In 41st millennium, as implied by the "40,000" in the name. The nature of humanity in the 41st millennium is exemplified by the game’s tagline: In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future, There is Only War. Every part of the human experience from science and research, to industry, to religion, is entirely dedicated over to warring with the various factions in the Warhammer 40K universe. All aspects of life in the human Imperium are dedicated to the war effort. In fact, the soldiers themselves comprise not brigades and battalions, but legions and chapters. Warhammer 40K Space Marines have more in common with the Knights Templar than with current era soldiers. They are fanatical crusaders with unwavering faith and dedication, destroying vast swaths of the universe in the name of the long dead and deified Emperor.

The Game

Dawn of War II is the second game in the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War series, with the first game being a still highly regarded and highly played example of strategy gaming. Departing from its tabletop origins, Dawn of War II is a real-time strategy game, or RTS. Players fight enemies that react in real-time, without the delay that is characteristic of a turn-based game, where players wait until other players are finished moving before they can attack or react to changes on the battlefield.

The game focuses on the Blood Ravens chapter of the Space Marines, genetically engineered super-soldiers of the Imperium. In the single-player campaign (which can also be played cooperatively), the player is charged with the defense of a number of planetary systems from incursions by Orks, Eldar, and the Tyrannid swarm. Playable landscapes vary between urban areas, to deserts, to dense jungles.

In the multiplayer component, there are two modes to pick from: Annihilation and Victory Point Control. In Annihilation, the player is tasked with completely obliterating the opponent’s structures and fighting units. In Victory Point Control, the objective is to control a series of points on the map. The more points a player controls, the more points are removed from the player’s opponents. When a player or computer controlled force loses all of his, her, or its points, that entity is defeated and removed from play. There are eight playable multiplayer maps: three one-on-one maps and five 3-on-3 maps. Players can fight any combination of AI and human opponents that the given map can support. Multiplayer-playable factions include a wide variety of Space Marine chapters, Ork Clans, Eldar Craftworlds, and Tyrannid Hive Fleets.

The Technology

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II is powered by version 2.0 of Relic Entertainment’s Essence Engine. Version 1.0 of the Essence Engine powered Relic’s Company of Heroes from 2006, and all of its subsequent expansion packs. The engine offers such graphical features as High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting; advanced shader effects, dynamic lighting, dynamic shadows, and normal mapping technology for surface bump mapping simulation. Essence Engine 2.0 also supports multi-core CPUs and physics-based graphical effects. Essence Engine does support DirectX 10, but Dawn of War II does not include that functionality. This is a DX9 only game.

The Competition

For this evaluation, we are including six video cards; two from each of the three tiers of high-performance discrete graphics cards. In the high end Enthusiast class, we have the AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285. In the Performance class, we are including the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 275 and the AMD Radeon HD 4890. Down in the Mainstream, we are using the 1GB AMD Radeon HD 4870 and the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 (with 216 shaders.)