Supreme Commander and laptop gaming
Laptop gaming isn’t hugely popular, especially for new games like Supreme Commander with its fairly high requirements, unless you have quite a bit of money for one of the top end laptops. But some of today’s low-mid and mid end laptops actually have some decent performance. Especially with the Core Duo and Core 2 Duo systems and a game like Supreme Commander which can take advantage of more than one core. In this article, I will review performance of the game itself, but I plan on a second to explore the performance of battery life while playing and see how long you might actually be able to play on one of those long plane rides.
Since I am away from home in a remote area for several months I can’t game on my more powerful desktop system, which is a 2.4 Ghz Athlon 64 with GeForce 7900GS SLI and 2 GB of memory. My laptop is an Inspiron e1505 with a 1.6 Ghz Core Duo with a GeForce Go 7300 and 1 GB of memory. These are fairly common specs, except for the discrete graphics core which I upgraded to. Interestingly enough the graphics core is the same as the Quadro NVS 110m except for the amount of dedicated memory and total memory size with Turbo Cache. I have WinXP SP2 installed with all updates up to three months ago.
According to what I have found out, Supreme Commander can take advantage of up to 4 cores. Given that I only have two, obviously only two will be used. I tested out the game running at 1280×800 native resolution, with all graphics options turned completely down. I also tested it in dual core and single core mode (an option which can be selected from within the BIOS). I played skirmish mode on Ian’s Cross with 3 AI’s, one Normal, one Challenge, and one Supreme with unit max set to 1,000 to allow for stressing the CPU. This is basically subjective, with my impressions based on the frames per second shown on the Fraps overlay and how responsive and how fast the game feels to me.
First time through I played with dual core enabled. I found that it had a comfortable frame rate and responsiveness until about 350-400 units. After that I noticed a small graphical and game play slowdown, but mostly only when I was zoomed in pretty far and able to see the individual units. Once I got above 600 units it started to became pretty noticeable even in the strategic zoom level.
Second time through I played with the dual core disabled. I verified this by checking that the Task Manager only detected 1 CPU. After I got up to about 150 units I started to notice a some jerkiness and very slight slowdown. By about 300 units everything had started to noticeably slow down. By the end of the game I had about 500 units and the game had become nearly unplayable. From the Fraps overlay, it appeared that the FPS was maxed out at about 3 (that’s unplayable).
To sum everything up, dual core rules when implemented well in games. The minimum requirements read as needing a 1.8 GHz CPU, but I managed some pretty decent performance at only 1.6 GHz with a dual core. If Supreme Commander can take as good advantage of quad core as it can of dual core, then it will be possible to max out the 1,000 unit limit with 7 AIs on one of the giant maps and not notice much, if any slowdown [ed. note: not likely]. As a follow up, in a few months once I get home I will compare the performance with my more powerful desktop system (although its processor is only single core). I suspect that game play performance will only be approximately the same, if not slightly slower.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:33 am
Interesting. So it does sound like mobile gaming is feasible with Supreme Commander (a finding that interests me because one of my prospective job offers requires lots of travel). So long as you can put up with turning the graphics quality options all the way down, anyway.
April 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 am
“with all graphics options turned completely down. ”
wow, that’s horrible. I wouldn’t bother playing the game like that. would rather just play a Flash game in a browser window or chess or minesweeper… would be a more pleasurable experience. =P
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:30 am
With my roommate we play supcom on the latest macbook pros, never noticed any slowdown (okay, 7AI on the 81×81km might be still slow).
these are excellent laptops to play (at least ;)
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:21 am
@jay:
I disagree. Supreme Commander is still supremely enjoyable even when the graphics are turned so far down that you’re playing with little more than strategic zoom icons. Yes, the graphics did make for some of the initial enjoyment upon first playing the game, but after seeing your hundredth nuke or commander explosion, it stops being impressive. What keeps me coming back at this point is the gameplay, and the gameplay is the same whether the graphics are excellent or not.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:26 am
Jay, you wound me!
I get pretty much the same performance out of my desktop. It’s an FX 3500+, which is a single core chip. The graphics card is an old x800, which is just painful. At lowest graphics, I can barely run the game. As long as it’s not a map with trees. Then there’s no hope.
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:30 am
There was a complaint in the recent Sentry Point map profile post about how lag-inducing that map is. Now that you mention it, I wonder if that lag is caused by the abundance of trees …
April 3rd, 2007 at 11:57 am
@jay:
How often do you actually spend fully zoomed in? I actually have the icons turned on all the time, even zoomed in. It lets me get a quicker grasp of what each unit I am seeing is doing. Hmm…I wonder if they could patch the game to let us set the point at which the units start to appear. It could be very possible to even play with the icons only and have the units themselves turned off. Just think of how many more people would be able to play?
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Top end gaming laptops are an absolute rip off. And they’re pretty heavy so you’re really better off buying an equivalent desktop for half the price.
I managed to ‘acquire’ a top spec Dell XPS last week for the bargain price of €1200. Now that’s value for money. It can’t run everything maxed out with lots of units. But it runs medium pretty flawlessly regardless of numbers.
April 3rd, 2007 at 12:20 pm
Yes, top-end gaming laptops are expensive, but they can be worth it. For instance, one of my current job offers is with an IT consulting firm. The job involves weekly travel by plane across the country. Spending all of that time in airports and on planes would make a nice gaming laptop a good investment.
By the way, a long time ago (like over seven years ago), I remember playing Total Annihilation on the plane when I had access to my mom’s laptop. I got all the way up to the construction of a Krogoth before the power ran out. I haven’t played computer games on a plane since (mainly due to the lack of laptops), but I wouldn’t mind doing it again!
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Well, the problem is that most laptops with decent specs are designed as a mobile desktop more than a laptop. You know, they have huge, power sucking screens, multi-doom optical drives*, and massive hard drives. Admittedly, a large drive doesn’t take any more power than a small one, but it illustrates the point, no?
*I’m not entirely sure on power requirements of optical drives of various classes, so this leaves pretty much just the display as my main argument, but with some laptops boasting absurdly large 19″ screens, I think it’s big enough on its own.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Optical drives in laptops should be avoided while on-the-go. Luckily, it’s pretty trivial to make disc images and then mount them with Daemon Tools. If I did have a laptop and some game needed the disc to be in the drive for some silly reason, I’d either make a disc image or just use a no-CD crack. You’re right, unnecessarily running optical drives on laptops does cut down battery life.
April 3rd, 2007 at 1:47 pm
where did I say anything about “fully zoomed in” or “watching nuke explosions”? I’m talking about the disgusting look of no Anti-Aliasing on a modern game, probably no shadows, no bloom, etc.
I default NVTray to run 4xS AA all the time for everything and it’s not like I’m on a top-of-the-line machine either. It’s a single-core 3200+ A64 and a 7900GT. I’m just saying, personally, I couldn’t stand to play a game like SupCom without some decent graphical settings. I just deal with not playing HUGE battles right now until I upgrade. But at least the game LOOKS like it’s made in 2007 when I play it instead of 1997 with jaggies everywhere…
Personally I’d rather play a Flash game or chess or similar. That’s just me…
April 3rd, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I play SC on a laptop:
Core Duo – 2 GHZ
2GB ram
7900 GS Go
It runs pretty well, and works great for draining the battery :)
April 4th, 2007 at 8:32 am
For what a laptop with those stats costs, I’d hope it plays fairly well! =)
April 4th, 2007 at 9:49 am
I used to work in the aiport. I was walking by one day about a year ago and saw a guy playing Total Annihilation on his laptop. Went over and chatted with him for like 20 minutes. He was bombing stuff and I showed him how to line bomb. :)
April 5th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
I don’t have a very good computer (in fact, I don’t have SupCom either, I’m just reading about it :p), but I am planning on buying a gaming lap top. I don’t care if it is just a portable destop. In fact, that is how I like it.
April 9th, 2007 at 4:28 am
Jay regardless I would still rather play Supreme Commander. You miss the point I don’t care what it looks like infact I play with lowest graphical settings I can just to max my fps. I don’t really care if the game looks like it was made in 2007 and 1997 you might but honestly I couldn’t care less as long as it’s still the same gameplay ill go back to TA’s graphics without gripe.
April 9th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Gaming laptops are expensive, yes – but if you know where to look, they’re not actually overpriced for what they give you. Sure, Alienware, Voodoo, WidowPC, Falcon NW et al are overpriced, but that’s just because they’re rebranding Sager/Clevo models and selling them for twice the price with a fancy paintjob. If you go directly to the source, it’s worth it. I’m on a Clevo M570U (Sager 5760 AKA Voodoo Envy 734) – Core Duo T2400, GeForce Go 7800GTX 256, 1920×1200 17″ display. Runs SupCom at full resolution pretty much flawlessly except for some minor CPU-induced lag when pathfinding with large groups of units, and cost me far, far less than what a “gaming laptop” boutique company would charge.
Sure, I don’t get the fancy paintjob, but who needs paint? *grins*
April 9th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Oh, and regarding CD drives: I have a second hard drive where my CD drive would normally be – nice feature of this model (if I wanted I could put an extra battery there, but I need the drive more). I just run everything off Alcohol 120.
May 13th, 2007 at 7:05 pm
Hi im thinking of getting the following
Metabox 735
512MB Nvidia 7950 GTX, Intel duo 2 core T7200 @2.00Ghz, 2GBDDR2 667,
will this run Supcom ok ?
or would the performance be much better with the duo AMD 64 with 2x 512 7950GTX (this costing like 1500more than the above)
November 29th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Hey, I tried running supcom on my macbook: 2 GHz core duo, 1 GB ram.
It doesn’t start up though, I get an error message saying “Unable to create Direct3D. Ensure system has updated drivers.”
Obviously this sounds like a video problem. I have Mobile Intel 945 express Chipset GMA 950. It has the most recent drivers I’m pretty sure. Anyone have suggestions?
December 22nd, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Andrew, that laptop doesnt have any videocard. You’ll have to find a way to reduce all settings as far as you possibly can, and even then it might not start.
on the Macbook pro from this July, 2.4ghz C2D, 2GB, and an nvidia 8600 256… I can host a game with two players at 500 units each and two AI at about 500 units each before the game starts lagging. last night w tried two people and four ai on the 40×40 map and it started running at half speed … :(
we didnt notice because the ingame timer was slowed down too,it was like it was set to a lower gamespeed, and as we killed lots of units it got a little better. I think it was cpu bound, as my laptop was burning hot etc.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:55 am
Hi – I am thinking of buying the following laptop and wondered if it would play supreme commander ok? Any thoughts?
Processor AMD Turion 64 x2 Processor TL 60
Processor Speed 1.9 GHz, 1600 MHZ FSB, 1 MB Cache
Operating system Genuine Windows Vista ® Home Premium
Memory 3 GB
Hard Drive 160 GB
Optical Drive DVD SuperMulti Drive
Memory Type DDR2
Screen Size 15.4” WXGA CrystalBrite
Graphics Card NVIDIA GeForce 7000M
Graphics Memory Up to 896 MB Shared
Sound Type High Definition
Infrared Port Included Yes
Battery Type Li-ion 6 cell
USB Connections 4
Wireless Enabled Yes
Thanks a lot
July 27th, 2008 at 9:05 am
yea i was wandering to if Supreme commander can run good on a geforce 7000M i tried comanpany of heroes with it and it runs not as great as op my desktop while the specs of the laptop are better than of the desktop
August 8th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I played supcom on my dell inspiron dual 1.73ghz 256mb ati graphics card and i upgraded to 2 GB of ram and i could play it on low 2 vs 2 AI all on a mod hard it was really enjoyable really never lagged bad but it did a little SADLY i cant play expansion because it lags so bad because THQ decided were gunna up the graphics lol. But luckily im selling it and im getting a monster computer amd 9950 black edition quad core 2.6 ghz 2x ati 512 4850 hd graphics cards 4 GB of RAM so ya im excited but supcom will still give u a good expiernece on mid-low range cpu but u cant max out anything
August 16th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
I was getting the “unable to create direct3d”. I found I need to have GPGnet open for Supreme Commander to run.
November 9th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
suntiger is right. Gaming laptops really aren’t bad at all when you know where to look. Especially when you take into account that they come with a “monitor”, “speakers”, and a “keyboard. If you factor those into the price, then gaming laptops really aren’t that much more than a gaming desktop. And the added mobility is more than worth the extra cost in my opinion. That being said, to address the original post, if you’re going to be playing games like Supreme Commander, then you’re going to want a GeForce graphics card. The quadro will perform worse in games designed for DirectX. Quadro cards are designed for CAD. Perhaps you can upgrade to a 8600m GT? These are very well priced these days and should be available.
October 14th, 2009 at 9:00 am
Dear strategy fans!
HP Pavilion dv5-1190eh
It runs Supreme Commander quite well. With max settings easily, but as the map and the number of objects increase i have to switch to lower and lower settings. 81×81 map with 8 players and 1000 unit limit set, i would like to see a computer that runs it on max like that, mine dosen’t… If i play such a big map with so many players i set the unit limit to 250, just to be sure. My battery life seriously degrades if i push the laptop’s performance to the limits, but i think that is absolutely normal considering how much a NV 9600M GT uses… Even if its a M(obile) version with less performance but lot less energy usage.
So far i havent really played on the run, but approx it lasts 30-50 minutes on max performance and with playing 3D performance games, and about 1h 30 – 2 hours on minimum (power saving set and surfing the net, writing e-mails, chatting, etc.) with a 6 cell battery. Which is quite good i think, as i have seen a few laptops. Soon i will go on flying a intercontinental long haul so i’m planning to aquire a 9 cell battery too for the trip.
Besides i think graphics are only important in simulators, where as it says simulates reality, so the closer it gets to reality the better, including graphics. All the other games graphics is one of the least important thing for me. Sometimes i still play with old games, as many of them are far better than todays shiny sh*ts… As they concentrate more on graphics and forget what is really important in a game: the feeling of playing it. I get bored of many of todays games so fast… I like supreme though as it has fantastic controls, and exiting gameplay, good job for the programmers \o/ cheers!
BTW it runs eg. Stalker on max without any problem. Anything i have tried so far. And it is not a high end gaming laptop, and its only around a €1000… Some gaming laptops could cost twice as much. Of course the limit is the skies… But performance to money wise it was a really good buy.
May the Mavor be with you…
Drake
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