Company of Heroes 3 PC Performance Review and Optimisation Guide

Company of Heroes 3 is here, and fans of the franchise will love it

The Company of Heroes series has returned, with the franchise's third game arriving almost 10 years after Company of Heroes 2. With Company of Heroes 3, Relic Entertainment has returned to their Essence Engine, transitioning the engine to DirectX 12 while dramatically increasing the detail of the models and destruction within the game. 

With Company of Heroes 3, Relic are hoping that their game can appeal to fans of their original Company of Heroes titles while innovating with this release by giving the game a traditional mission-based North Africa campaign alongside a new Dynamic Italian Campaign, which adds an almost Total War-like campaign map to the series alongside the game's standard real-time combat encounters.

Between the resurgence of Age of Empires, the release of Command and Conquer Remastered, and the return of Company of Heroes, it is safe to say that the real-time strategy genre is in the midst of a resurgence.

Graphically, we feel that Company of Heroes is a mixed bag. While model quality and animations are clearly better than prior Company of Heroes titles, it is clear that Relic didn't intend to push the limits of modern hardware with this release. Company of Heroes 3 uses no ray tracing, and runs remarkably well on older gaming PCs, but the cost of that is that the game's visuals are not as impressive as prior games in the series were when they launched. That said, it does make sense to make this game as easy to run as possible, given how niche the RTS genre has become.

Today, we will be looking at Company of Heroes 3, analyse the game's PC version and let you know which settings to tweak in order to get the best performance out of your gaming system. To do this, we have tested Company of Heroes 3 with 13 graphics card, ranging from AMD's aging RX 480 to Nvidia's RTX 4090. 

Review Contents

- Graphical Settings

- VRAM Use

- Resolution Scaling

- Settings Optimisation Tips

- 1080p Performance

- 1440p Performance

- 4K Performance

- 8K Performance

- Conclusion

Drivers and System Specifications

For today's testing, we have used AMD's Radeon Software 23.2.2 driver and Nvidia's 528.49 WHQL drivers. These are the newest drivers that were available at the time of our testing.

Before testing, we fully updated our Windows 11 installation and ensured that no unnecessary background applications were running on our test system.

Full System Specifications

Below are the full specifications of our game testing system, which we built in mid-2020 to meet the needs of future games. Alongside this system, we will be testing various old and new graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, including Nvidia's RTX series and AMD's RX 6000 series.

To help support the website, we have included Amazon affiliate links below should you wish to purchase the same or similar PC parts. You can read more about our games testing system here.

OC3D Game/GPU Test Rig (Affiliate Links Below)

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X Processor with Prescision Boost Overdrive
ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Formula (X570) Motherboard 
Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB Series DDR4 3600MHz (2x8GB) Memory
Corsair RM1000i Power Supply
Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Pro XT All-in-One Liquid CPU Cooler
Corsair MP600 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD
Corsiar Obsidian 500D RGB SE Case
Windows 11 x64