Supreme Commander
Doing the testing on Supreme Commander on such low end cards was a bit of a problem. We obviously wanted to be able to show you how the cards will perform in a real-life environment, but considering how CPU hungry the game is we also wanted to see how well the cards would perform without any other bottlenecks in the system. To satisfy both, we simply ended up doing two separate benchmarks. The first one was done on the test system like the rest of the tests, while we replaced the CPU with an E6700 for the second one.
This time around the values listed above tell the whole story. Out of the 3 cards tested only the HD2400 managed to deliver a playable experience, and even then barely. Because of that it was also the only card whose results were affected by the change of CPU, as the other two cards remained the main bottleneck even when using the E6300. At 1024x768 the XFX card and the HD2400 offered some level of control, though it was impossible to control anything but the smallest battles. Having more than 30 or so units on the screen dropped the framerate considerably. The Zotac card on the other hand, due to the slower shader clock wasn’t able to keep up. The minimalistic pixel shaded effects that the game uses (HDR, reflections on the water and snow, etc.) were just too much for it.
