Supreme Commander

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3280 patch applied. Supreme Commander is developed by Chris Taylor, the creator of the Total Annihilation series, and his development team, Gas Powered Games. Together, Taylor and his team have created what is widely regarded as the spiritual successor to one of the greatest RTS games of all time.

SupCom is a hugely tactical and strategic monster on a massive scale -- hundreds of units can appear on screen at once. It's a massive departure from anything else we've recently seen in the genre. It's one of (if not) the first RTS to allow the player to scroll out to view the scale of battle in its entirety.

We used the game's in-built performance test during our testing, as this provides over seven minutes of variable gameplay -- both zoomed in and out -- that should represent typical scenarios that a user is likely to encounter whilst playing the game. Due to the massive scale of the game, it's incredibly hard to accurately quantify performance in any other way. All in-game settings were set to their maximum values.






Supreme Commander scales pretty well across multiple GPUs on both AMD and Nvidia hardware – it’s therefore not much of a surprise that the similarly-priced Radeon HD 3870 X2 is a much faster card in this scenario. Here, we’re not talking about a few frames per second, we’re talking more than 30 percent faster in just about every scenario – the only scenario we’ve tested where it’s less than a 30 percent performance difference is at 1,680 x 1,050 4xAA 16xAF.

Compared to the standard-clocked GeForce 9800 GTX, the performance advantages are negligible and you certainly wouldn’t notice them during a frantic gaming session. The increased clocks and the subsequent price increase don’t balance well against the performance increase in this particular title.