Starcraft II GPU performance review - 13 GPUs tested

[Sempron Guy]

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I just wonder why ATI doesn't seem to give a damn about this game,....I mean the whole world has been waiting for this game. Could it be because of the the dx9 path blizzard took. That will make their dx11 cards less appealing. Or the way blizzard neglects multimonitor support (eyefinity and 3d vision ) and clinged to nvidia's stereoscopic 3d. Or two much bright lights this past months? Just my two cents though.

[P0w3rM0v3]

Yes, ATI has always been laggy when it comes to drivers. this has always been their achilles heel. If you look at the benchmarks of the cards now, the 4870x2s are actually performing slightly faster than the gtx295s. Which is not the case when both were released. On the get go, the nvidia cards seem to be doing their full potential (or almost) while the ATI cards always seem to need more tweaking in drivers.
Also, the DX9 thing is definitely a strange pick since DX9 is, what, 8 years old now?

[loloyis.com]

Blizzard opted for DX9 coz they want their game to run on almost all PC.
Highly optimized DX9 can be graphically amazing.
The pic below is a demo of CryEngine 3 running DX9 build. Looks great right.
But then it's CryEngine 3, hope StarCraft 2's engine is just about amazing.



Sources
CryTek's CryEngine 3.0 set to debut next month - Bright Side Of News*

[P0w3rM0v3]

Actually, this is what makes it strange since if you went with a higher DX engine, windows makes it possible to be backward compatible with older DX versions as proven with the crytek engine demo. But that would mean it wasnt as optimized with the older DX engines though since you are running in compatibility mode. Still, it would've been better performance wise to use the latest DX engine.

[loloyis.com]

ATI’s Official Response to Lack of AA options in Starcraft II

AMD constantly strives to deliver great gaming experiences for our customers and the upcoming launch of Starcraft II is no exception. Blizzard’s focus on incredible game play for all, means that gamers using ATI Radeon(tm) products can enjoy smooth HD gameplay and industry leading image quality with our current generation of ATI Radeon products as well as many of our past generation cards.

In discussions during the development of StarCraft II, Blizzard indicated that they would not initially include options to set levels of in-game anti-aliasing (“AA”). This meant that support for AA within StarCraft II would only be made possible by including it in the driver, an approach that could significantly impact performance.

Some third party reviews of the Starcraft II beta echo our concerns that AA can cause gameplay impairment. In these reviews, the third parties found that 4x AA led to a reduction in fps rendering at lower screen resolutions, which only became more noticeable at larger resolutions.

After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch.

We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date.

Draw your own conclusions.

Source: Lack of Anti Aliasing (AA) Options for StarCraft II: ATI’s Official Response | Hardware Canucks

[Sasori]

Blizzard will not support AA for the retail SC2, wise move for the ATI then.

[jopakal]

Now I see how the 460 really kicks in.

[vipvip68]

I don't see what all the fuss is about GPU performance... its a RTS game not a FPS.

Most of the cards do above 30fps at the minimum with ultra high details at 1920x1200...so what's the problem?

Basically if you have a HD5750 or better.. I don't see how getting faster frame rates will improve the gaming experience.

[libido]

btw RTS btw na nga game..dili FPS..

basin guro g DX9 rana sa blizzard para hasta ang mga old Cards maka duwa pud...dili lang kay kung dili maka support imong card for dx10..mapugos ka ug upgrade or ad2 ka sa net cafe...or mag laway nalang ka sa duwa..

mao na akong pag to-o (correct me kung sayop)..

[P0w3rM0v3]

I don't see what all the fuss is about GPU performance... its a RTS game not a FPS.

Most of the cards do above 30fps at the minimum with ultra high details at 1920x1200...so what's the problem?

Basically if you have a HD5750 or better.. I don't see how getting faster frame rates will improve the gaming experience.

Like i said in my 1st post, even 20fps is acceptable lol