In the coming weeks a new and exciting game will be released, titled "Supreme Commander". This new RTS features full cinematic detail, and in doing so, it requires quite a lot of processing power.
With all the visual enhancements enabled, Supreme Commander looks stunning, easily making one of the best looking RTS games of all time. However, as a result you can expect many computers to struggle playing this game with all the eye candy turned on. This can be quite disappointing for some because as good as the game play and fun factor is in Supreme Commander, having visual settings set at their maximum really does this game justice.
Therefore, before purchasing this game or even considering a hardware upgrade, it will be important to know first if your computer will run it, and second how good it will actually look while doing so. There is indeed a massive difference between low and high quality settings in Supreme Commander, suggesting older systems will still be able to run this title, which is always good news. However like I said, this game looks fantastic and playing it with low visual quality settings is almost criminal... a graphics card upgrade may be in order for some fanatics!
If you would like to know more about Supreme Commander, here's an excerpt from entry for the game:
“Supreme Commander is a real-time strategy (RTS) computer game, developed by Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games. It was first announced in the August 2005 edition of PC Gamer magazine and is referred to as the spiritual successor to Taylor's 1997 RTS game Total Annihilation, which was listed by Gamespy as the number one real-time strategy game of all time. The game is set for release on February 16, 2007 in Europe and four days later, February 20 in the U.S.”
Given that we only have the demo at this stage the testing has been kept to a minimum, testing just seven graphics cards on the Core 2 Duo platform. Once we have a full-version copy of Supreme Commander I will update this article with an AMD platform and of course more graphics cards. The performance might also improve in the final version. At this stage SLI seems to have no impact on the performance so this is something that will be fixed in the full-version I am sure.
We tested using three different in-game quality configurations (see next page for complete details) at three different resolutions (1024, 1280 and 1600). We have also put up a set of comparative screenshots depicting in-game graphics quality.
