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Like StarCraft II it appears that Supreme Commander 2 is nothing revolutionary, picking up where the original began, and honestly we feel that this is a good thing. For those of you who loved the original Supreme Commander game and just simply could not get enough of it, then we assure you the second installment will not let you down.
When it came to benchmarking Supreme Commander 2 to see how demanding this new RTS would be, we were pleasantly surprised. The original version was very demanding and I recall testing it just as we have Supreme Commander 2. At the time we threw the best processor and graphics cards at Supreme Commander and even they had a hard time delivering acceptable performance with maximum in-game quality settings enabled. Here are some comments regarding CPU performance from our conclusion 3 years ago when first testing Supreme Commander… “The more processing power you throw at this system the better, though I do not agree that multi-core processors ensure excellent performance. I ran a few tests using Core 2 Quad and Duo processors and noticed that the second, third or fourth cores did very little when compared to the first. In the most intense battles the first core would operate at around 90 ~ 100% where as additional cores worked between 20 ~ 50%.” Also come comments of graphics card performance… “The graphics card is obviously another key component to improving performance, though unfortunately the latest and greatest solutions again do not guarantee stellar performance. Having said that, anything less than a Radeon X1950 Pro is going to make life difficult when playing on the larger maps with more than 2 players. In fact, using the low quality settings at 1280x1204 saw the X1950 Pro render just 24fps on average. The ultra powerful GeForce 8800 GTX was not a great deal better, producing an average frame rate of just 31fps. The maximum in-game quality settings saw the 8800 GTX fall to an average frame rate of just 22fps.” Thankfully the situation with Supreme Commander 2 appears very different, at least in respect to the graphics card performance. The fact that we saw graphics cards such as the new Radeon HD 5830 rendering over 90fps at 1920x1200 with maximum in-game quality settings in place was impressive. Even much cheaper graphics cards, such as the Radeon HD 5750, delivered playable performance at this resolution, with an average of 60fps. Those playing at resolutions such as 1680x1050 or lower can enjoy Supreme Commander 2 in all its glory with older graphics cards such as the GeForce 9800 GT or Radeon HD 4770, which is impressive. That said, Supreme Commander fans that purchase the Radeon HD 5570 will be screaming, as this graphics card put plainly, sucked, even at 1680x1050 with an average of 36fps. Another interesting discovery was the CPU performance, which appears to have little impact on the game. When comparing platforms we found very little difference in performance between the Core i7 920 and Phenom II X4 965 processors. Furthermore, there was almost no difference between the Phenom II X4 965 and Athlon II X4 635 processors. CPU utilization was difficult to accurately measure in this game as the processor only starts to become a factor once a large amount of units exist. For example, at the start of any game we found that the CPU utilization would often sit on 0% with our Core i7 920 processor. That said, zooming out would increase utilization to about 10%. However once a large amount of units began to amass we were able to max out a single core. Finally, for those that cannot play using the high quality settings, Supreme Commander 2 does not look too bad when using the medium quality settings. Furthermore, we found that the medium quality setting would enable slower graphics cards, such as the Radeon HD 3850 and GeForce 9600 GT, to deliver playable performance at 1680x1050 which is quite impressive. |
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Artem |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 07:15 AM
cant wait to get my hands on this one, wish this game would have thousands of mods like Total Annihilation did |
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ProX |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 07:21 AM
Loved the article thanks. Cannot wait to get this, should get picking up my copy tomorrow. |
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Gromit |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 07:24 AM
Nice work on all the testing. Looks like my humble Phenom system with the GeForce GTX 260 will play this very well. |
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Robyrt |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 07:41 PM
Thanks for the writeup - but my Core i7-920 / Radeon 4850 system was struggling to get 40 FPS at 1920x1200 in the demo, compared to your 53 FPS. What am I missing? |
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W |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 09:13 PM
As stated in the article it is an "average" FPS and you also do not know what scene(s) they are using. I bet you are on a scene that gives you 40FPS and using that instead of the average. I know I had quite low frames with 300 units on my screen using a 5770 1GB. To be honest I would've liked to see a video of the 3 min game play and a minimum/maximum fps. But that would take a bit more time and is slightly an unreasonable request (especially the video part). I haven't done any tests, but memory can be a factor with some gamers since Supreme Commander is such a "huge" game. The test rig in this article has 6GB DDR3. I'm sure many gamers are still stuck with 4GB DDR2/DDR3 or less. Anyways from this article (and the demo) I know my E8400 3.8GHz | 5770 1GB | 8GB DDR2 probably won't be able to play with consistent smooth frames @ 1920 x 1200. However I am quite interested to see the scaling with CPUs in this article. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 03/01/2010 10:59 PM
I have the Radeon HD 4830 and I average about 45fps. If I stay zoomed out for 3 minutes this would turn into an average of about 30fps but you don’t play SC2 that way. I am using a Core i5 750 processor overclocked to 4GHz with 4GB of DDR3-1600 memory and the latest Catalyst 10.2 drivers. What are you using? |
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oFfOrDef |
Posted on: 03/02/2010 11:57 AM
The original SupCom was well known for only utilizing more then 2 cores when fighting against multiple AI's. Massive battles with up to 8 AI's would kill the fastest Quad Core of the time. It would be interesting to see if this is optimized as well, anyway at first sight it looks good for players without top of the range HW. |
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Makaveli |
Posted on: 03/03/2010 03:47 AM
Any word if this game supports dual monitors like the first one??? |
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Steve Posts: 76 Joined: 2010-02-08 |
Posted on: 03/03/2010 05:56 AM
Posted by Makaveli on 03/03/2010 04:47 AM
Yes dual-screens are supported. |
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Artem |
Posted on: 03/05/2010 06:22 PM
............ im disappointed its even worse than original SC, 10 units per side, almost at start you can build experimentals ... must be some kind of joke yes it looks nice, but content sucks, ****s ruined game, turned it into some poor starcraft clone, better go back to moded sc:fa or total annihilation |
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Mabis Feridin |
Posted on: 03/14/2010 05:21 PM
@Artem It's really hard to play other RTS games after SupCom. I keep spinning the mousewheel trying to zoom out. If SupCom 2 is Starcraft with strategic zoom then I don't need to buy Starcraft 2. |
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Raymond |
Posted on: 03/08/2010 06:49 PM
Supreme Commander Needed a 3rd party program "core maximizer" to use all cores I think Supcomm 2 will as well. |
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Calle2003 Posts: 15 Joined: 2010-04-27 |
Posted on: 04/29/2010 10:00 AM
Could you do an article with my favourite RTS Dawn of War II as well? Rather old game, but with the new expansion Chaos Rising maybe?  |
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Useable Technology |
Posted on: 07/03/2010 05:58 AM
f I stay zoomed out for 3 minutes this would turn into an average of about 30fps but you don If SupCom 2 is Starcraft with strategic zoom then I don't need to buy Starcraft 2. wish this game would have thousands of mods like Total Annihilation did Massive battles with up to 8 AI's would kill the fastest Quad Core of the time. |