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 medium.






Just like Call of Duty 4, Supreme Commander tells a story of pain for the ATI Radeon HD 3800-series cards tested here, because performance is good when anti-aliasing is disabled and unfortunately, performance is not so good compared to the GeForce 9600 GT when AA is enabled.

Indeed, when AA is disabled, the performance gap between the BFG Tech GeForce 9600 GT OC card and PowerColor's Radeon HD 3850 Xtreme is less than three percent at both 1280x1024 and 1680x1050. With 4xAA enabled at 1280x1024, the gap increases to 12 percent and then at 1680x1050 2xAA, we're starting to approach a 19 percent difference between the two cards.