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.

ATI Radeon HD 3870 X2

Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2

There is nothing of note to really report in Supreme Commander on both the Radeon HD 3870 X2 and the GeForce 9800 GX2. There are some small increases here and there, but there are also some scenarios where performance drops by less than one frame per second. And even though we're averaging three separate runs, that's still well within experimental variation.