Graphics

SupCom promises to be one of the first games with full DirectX 10 support, meaning that you'll be able to get full value out of your copy of Windows Vista and your GeForce 8800 or R600. However, DX10 support isn't ready yet, and neither are NVIDIA's drivers, so don't expect to get the full graphical goodness until March or April. For now, you'll have to put up with the DX9 path, which itself doesn't look half bad.

We played the game on a few different systems to get an idea of how it scales. We also spent a lot of time in the options screen, tweaking the various settings up and down to get an idea of how the frame rate corresponds to the visual quality.

As usual, we're sharing those discoveries with you over the next few pages. Obviously, the big thing to bear in mind is the dual monitor support. Rendering two monitors is obviously a lot more work than jsut rendering one but, thankfully, SupCom isn't such a resource hog that this is impossible.

Textures

The textures of the units, land and buildings look great at the top setting - you have Low, Medium and High to choose from, unsurprisingly. Toggling the quality of the textures themselves, however, won't get you particularly far - providing you have a card with 128MB of RAM, you're going to manage the top setting pretty easily. However, the big change in texturing really comes with the lighting, which is managed by a setting called 'Fidelity'. As we'll come to see as we move on, this Fidelity setting is really the one that's going to determine how good your game looks. Given that the textures aren't much of a drag, whack them up and enjoy.

Anti-Aliasing

This is one game where you're really not going to get much benefit from turning this on. The frame rate hit is the kind of hit you'd usually associate with 2, 4 and 8 samples of AA, and you have the option of one of those or none at all. Unless you get super-close in on a unit or a building, you're not going to notice the aliasing, so if you're struggling for performance, this is the first area to cut back on.

Terrain and Details

There is no specific setting that governs terrain detail, unlike Company of Heroes, but it is almost entirely governed by the Fidelity setting of which we spoke. High looks great, and will give you some nice terrain and some well-rendered trees that even catch on fire. Medium looks almost as good, and you'll primarily notice the difference between the two when you're looking at water, since the High water effects are particularly fancy.

However, pull it down to Low and you're going to be wishing you hadn't. Low is really a compatibility mode, and it strips the textures and the terrain of anything like their visual appearance, rendering you solid grey blobs, most of the time. If you have to play the game on Low, you're not going to want to. Thankfully, you almost certainly won't have to, unless you're trying to run on Intel integrated.