Supreme Commander

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3220 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.






XFX's GeForce 8800 Ultra 650M Extreme didn't uncover any surprises in Supreme Commander - it performed almost identically to EVGA's e-GeForce 8800 Ultra Superclocked. It was a couple of frames per second slower than our pair of BFGTech GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB cards, but the minimum frame rate was higher so you'll get an arguably better experience with either EVGA's or XFX's overclocked GeForce 8800 Ultra.

More interestingly, Catalyst 7.5 fixes the crashing problems we were having with a pair of CrossFired Radeon HD 2900 XTs in this title, but performance isn't really anything to write home about - you'll get less frames than a standard GeForce 8800 GTX at all of the settings we've tested here. Performance is a country mile away from the three different GeForce 8800 Ultras and the pair of GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB cards.