An enterprising Supreme Commander fan has come up with Core Maximizer, a utility for people with dual-or-more-core computers (or even hyper-threaded single cores, though you can't expect a great improvement from those) that makes the game run considerably better. It does it by more efficiently shifting the game's multiple threads onto cores other than the first.
The effect is a large increase in frame rate, at the cost of a small decrease in maximum "sim" speed - which isn't a very big deal, since I for one often find it beneficial to slow the game down a bit when complicated stuff is going on, anyway.
On my dual-core Athlon 64 PC (this one), running the standard "perftest" benchmark showed that Core Maximizer slowed sim-speed to 96% of what it had been, but accelerated render-speed by a factor of 2.4. This resulted in 23% more frames logged during the benchmark, which is pretty darn impressive for this extreme stress test. Other users have reported similar improvements.
(And yes, as an old TA player I, too, originally thought it sounded like a downloadable unit. "The Core Maximizer is a roving optimization system. It upgrades other units so that they move more smoothly.")
16 July 2007 at 3:18 am
May the blessings of the Flying Spaghetti Monster shower you with the finest Freshly Grated Parmesan. I only have a hyperthreaded P4 3.0, but every little bit helps.
16 July 2007 at 3:24 am
Hmmmm... Checking the graphs on the thread that you linked it seems that I may just get more than a "little bit" of improvment, since I have 2 gigs of RAM and a GeForce 7800.
17 July 2007 at 7:20 am
Holy awesome.
My Fatboys thank thee.
21 April 2008 at 4:44 pm
Actually my much-taxed P4 3.0 single core with hyper threading benefited considerably. Perhaps not as much as a true dual core system, but it runs much smoother now.