X-bit labs

Seven Friends of a Gamer: GPUs vs. Games Spring 2007 (page 11)

Category: Video

by Alexey Stepin , Yaroslav Lyssenko, Anton Shilov

[ 03/30/2007 | 12:55 PM ]

Performance in Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander belongs to the RTS genre, but this game has little to do with the other strategy described in this review, Company of Heroes. The game is epic in the best traditions of Total Annihilation and allows combining capabilities of different buildings and war units to achieve your goals. If you are into classic real-time strategies, Supreme Commander is going to please you for sure.

The game is pretty, but not perfect, in terms of visuals. Particularly, it lacks a realistic physical model and changeable landscape. Let’s see if this means lower system requirements.

Premium/High-End Class

With all the mentioned drawbacks the game is still very heavy on the computer’s graphics subsystem.

While GeForce 8800 GTX allows playing in all resolutions up to 1920x1200 with enabled full-screen antialiasing with sufficient performance reserve, Radeon X1950 XTX doesn’t offer any reserve of speed in 1920x1200, although you can still play comfortably in this resolution using GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB card. GeForce 7950 GX2 can hardly cope with the game even in 1280x1024 resolution, because its driver seems to have decided not to enable the second GPU at all.

Performance does not fluctuate much in this game: there is a very small difference between the average and minimum frame rate in every resolution with any graphics card. On one hand, this is customary for the genre Supreme Commander belongs to because most of the time a large-scale real-time strategy is to be viewed from above which smoothes out any fluctuations in speed. On the other hand, this is also an indication of a good optimization of the game engine.

If you want to play Supreme Commander on your current Radeon X1950 XTX, you don’t have to replace your graphics card as it is going to run this game at a high enough speed with enabled full-screen antialiasing. It’s different with the GeForce 7950 GX2. The dual-chip ex-flagship from Nvidia is not fast enough and offers a lower quality of anisotropic filtering in comparison with the AMD Radeon X1950 XTX and the Nvidia GeForce 8800 series.

Performance-Mainstream Class

The Performance-Mainstream graphics cards cope with this game quite successfully even though they run it with enabled full-screen antialiasing. This is especially true for the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB whose performance is high enough for playing at a resolution of 1920x1200 in the eye candy mode. The Radeon X1900 XT also has good results in 1920x1200, which is a typical native resolution of 23” and larger monitors, because the difference between the average and minimum speed is very small in Supreme Commander. You may want to limit yourself to 1600x1200 with this graphics card, though, just to make sure you’ve got some reserve of speed.

The GeForce 7950 GT is considerably faster than the Radeon X1950 Pro in high resolutions, but not in 1280x1024 which is the most important resolution for graphics cards of this class. GeForce 7900 GS results theoretically allow playing in 1280x1024 with enabled full-screen antialiasing, but its practical reserve of speed is low, so you may want to disable FSAA for higher gaming comfort.

Mainstream Class

Neither the Radeon X1650 XT nor the GeForce 7600 GT can provide even those 28 frames-per-second the GeForce 7900 GS delivered. In both cases the average speed is below acceptable minimal performance level, although we did not use full-screen antialiasing when benchmarking these cards.