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 tells us a similar story to the one told in our Call of Duty 4 testing – in that the HIS Radeon HD 3850 performs well when anti-aliasing is disabled, outperforming Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT and 8800 GS cards by a couple of percentage points. However, when anti-aliasing is enabled, the tables turn.

At 1280x1024 4xAA 16xAF, the HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ 3 TurboX 512MB falls behind Nvidia’s GeForce 9600 GT by around five percent – in isolation, that’s not too bad, but the gap increases significantly at 1680x1050 2xAA 16xAF. The gap in this particular scenario is a compelling 14 percent.