Battlefield 2142
We tested BF2142 by manually playing a specific level in the game while recording frame rates using the FRAPS utility. Each gameplay sequence lasted 60 seconds, and we recorded five separate sequences per graphics card. This method has the advantage of simulating real gameplay quite closely, but it comes at the expense of precise repeatability. We believe five sample sessions are sufficient to get reasonably consistent and trustworthy results. In addition to average frame rates, we've included the low frames rates, because those tend to reflect the user experience in performance-critical situations. In order to diminish the effect of outliers, we've reported the median of the five low frame rates we encountered.

For quality settings, we chose BF2142's "high quality" defaults, with a bump up in resolution to 1280x960. That means we tested with high quality texture filtering and lighting plus 2X multisampled antialiasing.

Things start out a little rough here for AMD's mid-range card. The 2600 XT runs well behind the GeForce 8600 GT, offering only borderline playability. The 2600 XT's performance scales up well in a CrossFire multi-GPU config, but not well enough to catch the 8600 GT in SLI. AMD's lower end cards fare better, with the GeForce 8500 GT bracketed by the 2600 Pro and 2400 XT.

Supreme Commander
Like many RTS and isometric-view RPGs, Supreme Commander isn't exactly easy to test well, especially with a utility like FRAPS that logs frame rates as you play. Frame rates in this game seem to hit steady plateaus at different zoom levels, complicating the task of getting meaningful, repeatable, and comparable results. For this reason, we used the game's built-in "/map perftest" option to test performance, which plays back a pre-recorded game.

Let's get this out of the way up front: Supreme Commander isn't a happy place for multi-GPU configs. SLI acts as a decelerator in this game, and CrossFire only delivers marginal performance benefits, at best. I've included the multi-GPU results for completeness, but we should focus on single-GPU performance.

Once we do, we see that relative performance in SupCom looks a lot like what we saw in BF2142. The 8600 GT outperforms the 2600 XT, and the 8500 GT slots in between the 2600 Pro and 2400 XT.