StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty GPU & CPU Performance

[Julio Franco]

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty GPU & CPU Performance

It's been more than a decade since the original StarCraft was released, but unlike a wide majority of the titles released in this time frame, the game never really faded away and throughout the years remained the benchmark of what a well-conceived real-time strategy game should be.

Read the full article at:
https://www.techspot.com/review/305-starcraft2-performance/

Please leave your feedback here.

 

[Puiu]

I just watched on youtube the whole story of starcraft just to be back on track with things. It's hard to remember the story after so many years.

 

[TitoBXNY]

SC2 is just awesome, the replay value is so high. The story is so epic that I remember it like any great movie that I've seen in the past. I keep redoing the same early missions over because I feel that the second time will be faster and better. A must own for any PC gamer.

 

[Guest]

i think you meant to say Ultra High Quality and not Ultra High Performance,
otherwise great stuff it'll work on my relatively old rig

 

[princeton]

Guest said:
i think you meant to say Ultra High Quality and not Ultra High Performance,
otherwise great stuff it'll work on my relatively old rig

Ultra performance. That's how it performs on ultra.

On another note I'm glad the game is so nvidia biased so my GTX 260 will even outperform the HD 5830. I do wonder why you guys benchmark on 16:10 screens when the standard nowdays is 16:9.

 

[Steve]

princeton said:

On another note I'm glad the game is so nvidia biased so my GTX 260 will even outperform the HD 5830. I do wonder why you guys benchmark on 16:10 screens when the standard nowdays is 16:9.

I only have 30" Dell screens (2560x1600) and I prefer 16:10

 

[Guest]

Likewise, I have a Dell U2410 which is also 16:10. I'm not surprised, by the way, that xfire/SLI support in SC2 is non-existent or even results in a decrease in performance. The same thing is happening in the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm beta. You have to edit a config file to get WoW to use a quad-core processor to its fullest as well. It's pretty disappointing that after 7+ years of development, SC2 is lagging behind on quad core and dual video card support.

The single player campaign is an absolute blast though.

 

[Guest]

I don't have much faith in those CPU results, my i5-750 is at 3.6GHz and paired with a 480 I haven't yet seen it go below 50fps, singleplayer or multiplayer. It's usually sat at 80-130.

 

[Skout]

Since it's obvious that it is quite processor-intensive, it would have been nice to see some stats on the minimum specs (2.2ghz) CPUs.. but I guess you guys didn't want to torture yourselves that badly..

 

[Steve]

Guest said:
I don't have much faith in those CPU results, my i5-750 is at 3.6GHz and paired with a 480 I haven't yet seen it go below 50fps, singleplayer or multiplayer. It's usually sat at 80-130.

Have you tested an 8 player game with 4 AI and 4 Human players? If not then you need to try that before placing your faith anywhere.

 

[Adhmuz]

Actually on the test side of things, if you really want to push your PC to the edge with this game try playing a fastest possible money map online with 7 other people, 4V4 with my system I get drops down bellow 30 FPS at time other than that if your not playing all out insane games like that or other crazy UMS games your never going to really have this game stress your system.

 

[TorturedChaos]

I picked up a copy the day it came out, didn't even have to special order it or anything. Just wandered into the game store after work .
I have to say though it took for ever to install - almost 2 hours - then had 3 patches it installed. After finally getting it running I jumped right into the single player campaign and made it through the first 3 missions on Ultra graphic settings (which are very pretty btw) before it crashed with a nv4_disp.dll error popping up(not BSOD, just everything went screwed up win 95 graphics and an error pops up saying that nv4_disp.dll has crashed & you have to reboot). Since they I have tried playing it several different ways and only way I can make it run is capping the fps at 60 (which isn't a big deal) and running everything on low graphic settings - that part makes me sad.
So far I haven't seen a true fix for it yet, and apparently a lot of other people with a 9800gt cards (or any 9800 or 8800 nvidia cards) are having similar issues.
Worst part is people where complaining about the exact same issue when it was in beta - but everyone just assumed that its the beta and bliz would fix the issue before the official release and blizz still hasn't fixed it.....
So I'm a bit disgusted right now with Blizzard.

 

[Guest]

Would a Q6600 work better with an older GPU?, and in the CPU test u should also use an ATI card to see if one GPU is better at taking more load from the CPU.

 

[TomSEA]

Love the range of graphics cards you guys used. Wish I could see every game covered like that. The Q6600 FPS is bizarre though. That's still considered a fine gaming proc by anyone's standard and to see it get slammed like that is frankly, a jaw dropper.

 

[Guest]

Any game that can only take advantage of 2 cores will suffer heavily on a q6600 because it doesn't have much cache because again it only can use half and the fsb is relatively slow compared even to core 2 duos of the same generation. It is too bad techspot didn't put up some numbers for the E8XXX series cpus as I am sure they would have been better than the Q6600.

 

[Guest]

EXACTLY...too many times people post their benchmarks that favor their taste lol...they'll post the results where there's nothing to minimum stuff going on in the game...

 

[PanicX]

@TorturedChaos
I also had this problem and would usually crash after about an hour of playing or alt+tabbing some. I upgraded my drivers to the Forceware 258.96 2 weeks ago and haven't crashed since.
I'm using an 8800GTS at 1680 x 1050 with all settings high except textures at medium.

 

[TorturedChaos]

@PanicX
Thanks, but after the first crash I made sure video drivers where up to date (latest is the 258.96 i believe) and all XP's updates were done. Still get the crashes sadly

 

[Guest]

Why does the i7 920 perform better than a Phenom II X4 at similar clock speeds? Doesn't the Phenom have 512kb/core L2 cache while the i7 has 256kb/core L2? Is it because of 8MB L3 on i7 vs 6MB L3 on the Phenom II? Or is it because of triple channel memory?

 

[Guest]

^ In CPUs it isnt all about numbers but what architecture the cpus have.

 

[Guest]

Ultra vs High seem identical in picture quality.

 

[ebolamonkey3]

I've gotta say, I'm pretty disappointed in SC2 in terms of game design. I don't mean multiplayer and balance or any of that, but I think Blizzard has gone overboard in trying to make the game run accessible as possible.

It's still DX9, which is ancient, does not scale to multiple monitors (to keep competition fair, fine, make it an option in game or in tournaments), has no crossfire/SLI support and doesn't take advantage of quad core CPUs (I can't even think of a good reason for this when the game runs fine on dual cores and single GPUs), and no LAN (anti-piracy, sure, but seriously, having to connect to Bnet, which may not be possible all the time, just to play with my friends sitting next to me, is very annoying to say the least).

Blizzard has tried to make SC2 as fair for multiplayer as possible and as forgiving on hardware as it can be, but I think they have taken it too far in their zeal. While I agree that the most important part of a strategy game is gameplay and not special effects, the game engine and graphics is already outdated before the game is released, and Blizzard's decision to not support current and future hardware (Quad core, Multi-GPU) is backward to say the least and is hardly the way to establish SC2 as a worthy successor to the original legend.

 

[TitoBXNY]

I have a Q6600 running at 3.4 on air and an Radeon 4870. I am running the game at max Ultra settings without issue.

 

[Guest]

In the past, I've ONLY played Starcraft on a LAN.. its the only time I have ever played SC...

Removing LAN support, especially in a country like Australia where internet simply isn't available everywhere at a reasonable latency and speed is a total game killer. Blizzard, what have you done?!

 

[Guest]

16:10 all the way. 16:9 screens only seem to go up to 1920x1080, and the extra pixels in say a 24" at 1920x1200 make a huge difference in the quality of the image. Plus, once you're used to 16:10, viewing web pages, or even just positioning windows on a 16:9 screen feels really cramped vertically.