Supreme Commander

Publisher: THQ

We used the full retail version of Supreme Commander with the version 3223 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.




We see a similar pattern in Supreme Commander too - the iChiLL Xstriker3 is slightly fractions of a frame per second faster than the reference-clocked GeForce 8600 GTS, but is slower than the Radeon X1950 XT 256MB at both 1280x1024 4xAA and 1680x1050 2xAA. Frame rates are just about passable at these settings, but given the price difference between the 8600 GTS and Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB, the performance difference makes the 8800 GTS 320MB seem like tremendous value for money in comparison.