Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway VGA performance review

Hell's Highway -- A Prologue

So before we start, of course first a little storyline on Brothers in Arms - Hells Highway.

Hells Highway, another WWII shooter some might say. But in reality the setting of war is really just a vehicle for Gearbox to tell the storyline of a Band of Brothers which is led by you, Sergeant Matt Baker, as they deal with the madness and consequences of war.

" Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway brings the critically acclaimed squad-based WWII shooter into the next generation of gaming with amazing graphics and sound, new cutting-edge gameplay features and a completely redesigned online component. Delivering on the franchise's compelling story, unrivaled authenticity and intense squad-based action, Brothers In Arms Hell's Highway drops you into Operation Market-Garden, the largest airborne operation of World War II. Lead Matt Baker, Joe Hartsock and the rest of the 101st Airborne Division as they fight to open "Hell's Highway" in a daring bid for a quick end to the war. "

The game tells the story of Operation Market Garden in the country yours truly lives, in the Netherlands (aka Holland). It's about the besieged journey from Eindhoven to Arnhem where tremendous battles where fought.

Exactly that road, Highway 69; the road from Eindhoven to Arnhem was later nicknamed: Hell's Highway.

On of the most impressive details is that the area of Operation Market garden was completely reconstructed by historical documents and images. It's uncanny to see and experience the design of 1944 Holland. Even now in 2008 you can still see striking similarities from our country. Street signs, building structures, clothing and even the clinker bricks on the roads dispense a true authentic mood.

Like all previous Brothers in Arms games, Hell’s Highway is squad-based. This shouldn’t be a turnoff for newcomers to the series, as the game introduces the concepts and strategies quite nicely of squad tactics. You are first started with a small assault group, and eventually are graced with a bazooka team, a base of fire team, and a machine gun team in different combinations. Using these squads to successfully lay down suppressive fire while you flank the enemy is essential to victory.

Did you see Band of Brothers from HBO/Spielberg? Hell's Highway feels like a lost episode of the show, and has the sense of scale and cinematic sumptuousness that you'd expect from Hollywood. Unlike the console, the visuals that have been presented within the PC version are sharper, more detailed and less static.

Our level: As some of you guys might know, I'm Dutch, so what level would be more appropriate than one of the starting levels, in a field in the Netherlands, moving towards a large windmill ahead of us. Lot's of geometry is to be found here and in fact one of the more complex scenes to render for the GPU. Yes, welcome to Holland.

So we took the following graphics cards to include in this VGA performance test:

We then selected an image quality setting, applied to all cards. Since the graphics engine can deal with a lot, we opt the best image quality available in-game, unfortunately in-game AA is not (yet) supported so we test without it. Would could brute force it by the driver yet then we'd have differences between the AA methods among ATI and NVIDIA. Below an overview of our settings after which we'll show you a couple of screenshots.