Game speed tweaks: S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Supreme Commander and Oblivion

Supreme Commander
No doubt, fans of Chris Taylor’s original Total Annihilation will be well on their way to completely mastering his latest game. But mastering the frame rate? That’s another question entirely, and one we’ll handily, er, handle here.

Quad squad
Supreme Commander is one of a new breed of games that takes full advantage of multi-core CPUs. The benefit you will gain from a dual-core processor over a single-cored one cannot be overstated. If you have serious plans to play SC until your bones are brittle, white stalks and everyone you once knew and loved is dead, invest in a Core 2 Duo or Athlon 64 X2 – whatever your current budget and platform limitations allow.

Our benchmarks showed that Supreme Commander’s frame rate improved by 50% going from one core to two, 30% from two to three and 10% from three to four. Considering this made the game go from an unplayable 19fps to an extremely smooth 56fps, with eight AI players going full-pelt, it’s clear that quad-core has its place in gaming and will only increase in importance as time goes on.

Supreme Commander demands a lot from your CPU, so one with two or more cores can make a huge difference.

The shadow?!?
Yes, unit shadows. Turn them off. All of them. For years shadows are still the number one cause of crippled performance in games, and Supreme Commander is no exception. Unless you’re running space age GeForce 8800-like hardware, just send those black blobs home. If you’re lucky, this alone will give you a playable frame rate and you won’t have to mess around with other tweaks.

Left shows bloom on, but it’s a personal taste thing, we actually think it looks better with bloom off (right).

Water detail turned on (left) and off (right). On water-heavy maps, having water off is a surprisingly effective tweak.