Increase your performance in Company of Heroes

8 September, 2008 (07:26) | Company of Heroes | By: A Gaming Moose

I run into a lot, and I mean A LOT of people who need to increase their performance in Company of Heroes. The problem is that the performance bar isn’t always helpful. When Company of Heroes first came out, it was pretty worthless and at least now, its a fair gauge of performance in Company of Heroes.

So what happens with some of these people is that are used to playing against the computers in Company of Heroes and are just now graduating into the “Big Leagues” and starting some real multiplayer games with four or more people. They are used to having a little performance decrease when playing local skirmishes, but when you play online, because of Relic’s crappy netcode, you can seriously degrade the other players experiance if you don’t turn down your settings. So hopefully this guide will get out there to some of the in-between players and help you enjoy the game more, and make your game run smooth!

So first we start with the issue that many don’t even realize they have; Port Forwarding. Company of Heroes uses a peer to peer system, and you can greatly increase the amount of games you can get into by opening up UDP ports 6112 and 30260 (what the readme says is wrong for the ports needed for Company of Heroes). If you don’t know how to do this with your router, do a google search with your router and how to do port forwarding, there should be plenty of guides out there. This will greatly increase your abillity to connect with other people in Company of Heroes.

Another excellent way of increasing performance in Company of Heroes is to mess with some video options. Now, you may think that you have a super computer (and you probably do!) but when you get into the larger games in Company of Heroes, you can really start to run into performance problems with your video settings if you have everything cranked to max.

A good start is to turn off Post Processing in the video settings; this will greatly reduce load times in Company of Heroes. It also will put less of a strain on your system. The rest of the options are pretty self explanatory in the video settings. Try turning down AA and look at tweaking the texture detail. The texture detail will eat your ram alive if you set it to high and will increase your load times. Also, for the love of the deity, DO NOT USE DX10!. It currently is poorly optimized and will greatly hurt your Company of Heroes performance.

Another way to increase your performance in Company of Heroes is to turn down the Physics. The physics in Company of Heroes can use up a lot of CPU power when trying to determine the path of flying bodies and bits of buildings. If you turn it off, you won’t get all the flying bodies, but then again, your computer won’t lag out when artillery hits in CoH.

Overall, the biggest thing to increasing performance in Company of Heroes is to know when your computer is struggling, and turn down those settings for the benefit of the people playing with you. But you cannot do that while in a game, so do it afterwards, or better, before you get in the game! Also, you will decrease your load times by keeping the textures and other settings on medium/low, and it will still look really good; and people won’t yell at you for ruining their game!

So play around with the different settings in Company of Heroes and try and find a balance for the types of games you usually play, (1v1s, 2v2s, etc).