Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance Results

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is a standalone real-time strategy computer game expansion to Supreme Commander, developed by Gas Powered Games and published by THQ. Because it is a standalone expansion, it is possible to play without owning Supreme Commander. Forged Alliance adds new game play features to the game, several new units for the three preexisting factions, and is further optimized for increased performance beyond that of the original game.

Supreme Commander makes extensive use of two technologies relatively unused in video games prior to its release, namely multi core processing and multi monitor displays. When detecting a multi-core processor, the game assigns a specific task, such as AI calculations, to each core, splitting the load between them. Supreme Commander is one of the first games to specifically support dual and quad core processors in the game.

Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance may not offer the first-person shooter experience that many gamers prefer, but the graphics are among the most demanding possible. Even so, there begins to be a trend showing which places high demand on the graphics card as evidenced by mutually low minimum frame rates.

The average frame rate showed that the G80-based 8800 GTX is still up for a fight, while performance was practically matched between the 8800 GT and the 9800 GTX. The only real stand-out was the GeForce 9800 GX2, which rendered the majority of frames much faster than the others.

Unlike World in Conflict, Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance does not use a short in-game benchmark to determine a score. In these tests, Supreme Commander plays an entire round of the game from start to finish and generates composite scores based on this lengthy test. This composite score is based on two factors: sim and render.

The AMP!'ed 8800 GT couldn't catch the 8800 GTX, which also feel behind the 9800 GTX. Of course the 9800 bullied its way to the top of the SupComMark composite score.

Supreme Commander proved to be a harsh gaming engine for video cards, and Crysis certainly applied some heavy pressure, but let's see how World in Conflict holds up against our performance testing in the next section.

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