StarCraft II Revisited: How Much Gaming PC Do You Need?
-
Page 1:Our Second Round With StarCraft II
-
Page 2:Test Hardware: Graphics Cards And Platform
-
Page 3:Test Methodology
-
Page 4:Test System And Settings
-
Page 5:Benchmarks Results: Medium Quality
-
Page 6:Benchmarks Results: Ultra Quality
-
Page 7:Benchmarks Results: Ultra Quality, 4x AA
-
Page 8:Benchmark Results: CPU Performance
-
Page 9:Conclusion: StarCraft II Can Put Your PC To The Test
Conclusion: StarCraft II Can Put Your PC To The Test
Our new, demanding StarCraft II benchmark shows that this game can really brutalize your PC during large-scale battles. While a decent graphics card is necessary to really enjoy the highest graphical settings, your platform and CPU are even more important when it comes to the minimum frame rates.
It’s a little disappointing that Blizzard didn't code the StarCraft II engine to take advantage of more than a couple of CPU threads. Indeed, there is a lot of room to improve the minimum frame rates here.
We'd like to hope that the developers would upgrade the StarCraft II engine over time to take advantage of today’s multi-threaded CPUs—if this was the case, even budget processors like the Athlon II X3 might show a performance advantage over the quad-core results we see with the game in its current state. Of course, that isn't going to happen.
As things stand, a high-end Core i7, something in the realm of a Core i5-750, or a fast quad-core Phenom II X4 CPU is the best way to experience StarCraft II.
The game engine is relatively easy on graphics cards at Medium details, which remains an attractive setting. This is good news for mainstream gamers who'd like to upgrade to something affordable for StarCraft II. Enthusiasts aiming for the Ultra detail level will want to equip their PC with a graphics card that boasts a little more muscle, such as a Radeon HD 5830 or GeForce GTX 460. Players planning to enable AA should consider Nvidia's GeForce cards--specifically the GeForce GTX 460 or better.
On a final note, we’d like to thank Gigabyte for supplying all of the cards we tested in this StarCraft II evaluation. The fact that all of these boards boast aftermarket cooling solutions helps take noise out of the equation here.
- Our Second Round With StarCraft II
- Test Hardware: Graphics Cards And Platform
- Test Methodology
- Test System And Settings
- Benchmarks Results: Medium Quality
- Benchmarks Results: Ultra Quality
- Benchmarks Results: Ultra Quality, 4x AA
- Benchmark Results: CPU Performance
- Conclusion: StarCraft II Can Put Your PC To The Test
1. While the benchmark the author kindly put a lot of effort to make is nice, I believe it's much worse than the worst case scenario for most ppl, most people play online against human opponents or play against the AI in the single player campaign or to get some training before diving into multiplayer. IMHO it should have tuned down a little or the GPU/CPU recommendation should be stated with less certainty. Readers should put that well in mind.
2. ATI released CCC10.9 after the article was written and it is said to improve the performance while AA is on, but I really have to test this to confirm. If anyone tested the new driver please share the results!
3. For those whiners about not including their hardware in the piece: STOP! It is near impossible to include all the hardware out there, besides I always noticed that Don is somehow limited on the hardware side, so he only used what cards Gigabyte offered, and that was clearly stated in the article. As for the CPUs he did a comparison of 1, 2, 3 and 4 phenom 2 cores, so this should give you a good idea how the game scales with CPU cores and it is obviously not threaded well enough to make use of Phenom II x6 6 cores.
Feel free to thumb me down!
show off :P care you maybe share some frame rates with your bragging?
I wish the i5 750 was included as a comparison.
Hence why I regret my ATI purchase.
It's good hardware but the constant driver issues & benchmarks such as these make you think twice.
Still relevant!
Of course this is just personal exp.
Some games will run better with nv, and some better with ati.. Don't really care as long as I can play it smoothly. And usually 1-5 fps don't determine that.
Yep it worked flawlessly on my 5770 1GB + Athlon II X3 435...
show off :P care you maybe share some frame rates with your bragging?
What driver issues you are talking about? I had none. If you don't care about power consumption, temps and noise then perhaps you should consider Germi.