Warhammer 40.000: Dawn of War

This real-time strategy is new to our reviews. It is based on the well-known gaming universe called Warhammer and has a certain resemblance to Warcraft 3, but features much more detailed graphics since Dawn of War has appeared recently, unlike the hit from Blizzard. The battle scenes of the game are superb and impressive, and there?s only one drawback ?the game has one solo company and you can play the Orks, the Eldar or the forces of Chaos only in the skirmish mode or on the network.

We include this game into our review because it features complex graphics and presents quite a load for a modern graphics card. Alas, like a majority of strategy games, Dawn of War isn?t benchmarker-friendly and we had to measure the frame rate using the FRAPS utility.

It is a general trend for games of that genre that the pure speed depends heavily on the performance of the CPU, yet we can notice a certain advantage of GPUs from ATI Technologies in high resolutions. The SLI mode quite unsurprisingly gives no speed boost and sometimes even worsens the performance.

FSAA and anisotropic filtering enabled, ATI?s cards feel more confident and increase their advantage over their competitors from NVIDIA. This time the SLI technology works quite right, especially for the GeForce 6600 GT couple ?you get a hefty performance bonus in 1600x1200.