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.






Supreme Commander shows us a very similar pattern to the one we saw in Call of Duty 4, where some of the Radeon HD 3800-series cards marginally outperform the reference GeForce 9600 GT—or at least match it for performance. Then, once anti-aliasing is turned on, the GeForce 9600 GT in particular moves to the head of the pack, delivering higher frame rates than not only the Radeon HD 3850 cards, but also the Radeon HD 3870.

Zotac's card is around five to ten percent faster, depending on the resolution and settings, and again it's pretty close to the GeForce 8800 GT 512MB.