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.








Supreme Commander scales well with multiple GPUs – in fact, it scales so well that the GeForce 8800 Ultra looks rather useless and, well, slow in many of the scenarios tested here. For example, the GeForce 9800 GX2 is 95 percent faster than the card it's replacing at 2560x1600 4xAA.

That's also bad news for the Radeon HD 3870 X2 as well, because while it's faster than the GeForce 8800 Ultra, it's only around 33 percent faster. That means it's around 47 percent slower than Nvidia's new top dog – it looks like competition in the graphics card market returned for all of about six weeks. Where's that drawing board again?