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.





Things turn southwards in Supreme Commander though, as both the HIS and Sapphire Radeon HD 2600 XT are outperformed across the board by the stock-clocked GeForce 8600 GT. At 1280x1024, the optimum resolution for these cards, the HIS Radeon HD 2600 XT IceQ Turbo GDDR3 graphics card is 18 percent slower than the 8600 GT.