StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty GPU & CPU Performance

Great article Steve, thanks!

A question:

Im about to buy an imac 27" with i5 core. I have not decided yet but it will be either the quad-core, 2.8ghz with 8mb L3 cache or the duo-core, 3.6Ghz with 4mb L3 cache. The graphics card will be radeon 5750.

How do u reckon starcraft II will run on this computer? what CPU/core would you choose out of the two above?

I would greatly appriciate a quick answer.
thanks again.

Get the Core i5 750 or 760 for sure.

It has been said the game is designed to be played 16:10. You are actually as a slight disadvantage playing 16:9 as part of the original screen is cut off. You don't, however, get any extra real estate going over 16:10 (i.e., dual triple screen setup).

has any1 played this game with a pentium D dual core 3.2 ghz cpu or worse on medium settings or better? My cpu is well above the minimum specs and I can only play the game on low settings..

Is this a biased review? I'm playing on a Q6600 coupled with a 8800 GTS and 3GB RAM, and I'm not having a single fps problem at ultra settings 1680x1050. I even play 4vs4 or income wars without any noticable fps drop.
And I don't think my PC is any better of those taken into account in this benchmark...

IMHO many hardware components are either overrated or placed on the wrong motherboards...

Yes its a biased review of course ... there is simply no way that old hardware will handle 4v4 games using the ultra settings, don't even try to feed us that. Of course what you call a "single fps problem" likely differs from what we believe is playable...

If you think that a Q6600 is too old to play along with an 8800 then there's something wrong. I said I'm having a very smooth gameplay with Starcraft 2 at 1680x1050 at ULTRA settings. I didn't benchmark honestly, but I'm not having problems with a tons of units on screen 4vs4, nor with Crysis Warhead at full details or any other game.
And also you will never notice any difference over a certain fps.

I've been running my Q6600@3Ghz with a HD5850@850/1200. And lots of units at 1920x1200 ultra settings isn't a problem, until I go protoss and put 8-10 Carriers spitting out interceptors with a Mothership trying to apply the cloaking visual effect to them. At that point I get a message on screen advising me to reduce settings to improve performance o_0, mind you thats with the machine running 3 hard level AI opponents on it too...

I also found a 35 Void Ray army caused a bit of fps loss when all building up beam damage.

Definitely situations can arise that will show up the bottleneck of my old CPU

PS: Forcing AA and max quality details in Catalyst Control Center.

Yes with the Q6600 and much faster graphics cards our 8-player benchmark kills this processor and we often see slow down. Of course this only happens once each player gets about half way to the unit cap but it happens every time. Which is why we recommended a more modern processor ... made sense to me.

Honestly I was going to let him go on that call "my 8800 GTS with Q6600" plays all games using the highest settings. haha

Why have we been wasting all of our time researching new hardware when Nvidia created the only graphics card today's games need almost 4 years ago.

On a side note we tested Crysis Warhead using a Q6600 processor overclocked to 3.0GHz and if you find an average of 21fps acceptable then yes the 8800 GT can play this game using the highest in-game quality settings with AA turned off. Also worth noting is that the 8800 GTS averaged just 23fps, hardly perfectly playable but everyone has their own standards

http://www.techspot.com/article/118-crysis-warhead-performance/page3.html

Anyway lets get back on topic, pretty sure this thread is about StarCraft II and we do have one for Crysis Warhead if that is what you wish to discuss.

I've been playing SC2 on a Centrino Duo system with 128 MB of integrated memory. lulz

Next week, however, I'll have the machine described in my profile. :D

You really ought to do a follow up to the benchmark. I dont find it very useful.

Why haven't you tried different CPU architectures rated at the same clock speed to get a real sense on what is doing what.

For example. Why is the only Athlon 2 processor rated at the lowest clock speed of all the CPU's?

Of cource it's gonna show up last.

It would be far more interesting to know how a Ahtlon II X2 260 @ 3.2 Ghz performed vs. a Phenom II X2 555 Be @ 3.2 Ghz.

That would really have clued us in on how much L3 cache matters.

I don't understand how you can get any useful information from your benchmark with the CPU's all rated at different clock speeds and not even rated against price.

Hey Steve,

Although I disagree with the posters who feel your results are wrong based on their own campaign or 1v1 experiences, I am curious as to how much better the fps will be when playing a 1v1. Is there any chance you could provide us with those figures?
I am building a new computer and looking to use fraps on my 1v1 replays and would like to have a "base" fps figure to use so I can estimate what my final fps will be once recording with fraps.

Thanks!

Great article, this is what brought me to Techspot! However, it is getting dated pretty quickly and I was hoping we could get an update on this for a couple of reasons

1) Catalyst 10.9 claims to have fixed CrossFireX scaling; ("ATI CrossFireX™ now functions properly, and in-game Anti-Aliasing can now be enabled in “StarCraft II”")

2) The new addition of the Radeon HD 6800 series and how it matches up against the GTX 460 (I myself moved from 5770CF to GTX460 solely because of Starcraft II)

3) I recall Blizzard saying the single player campaign uses higher quality models, and therefore taxes the graphics card more than multiplayer. Although this can change as the amount of units/players increase in multiplayer. In that regard, some custom games are impossible to play on Ultra, no matter how good of (commercial) rig you own.

Thanks Techspot!

when this game is running at optimal speed its beautiful and any one that wants to get the best out of there machine and this game should look at doing the upgrade it will be worth it!

I don't know how he's getting such an increase in performance when overclocking an i5 750 to 3.7Ghz. I overclocked mine to 3.645 and haven't seen any increase on a GTX 460 1GB. Does anyone know how he's doing it?

Its called a GPU bottleneck, they tested with a GTX 480 and that is how they did it.

But I thought anything beyond a GTX 460 is unnecessary in this game.