StarCraft II Revisited: How Much Gaming PC Do You Need?

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Uhm, what am I missing, I cant for the life of me find a " search by name" bar. I really want to be able to benchmark this replay but I'm not even sure wether you just download the replay or download the map or what.

Regardless I cant find either map or replays to download. What am I missing ? ._.
 
[citation][nom]Ihatemylife[/nom]Uhm, what am I missing, I cant for the life of me find a " search by name" bar... ...What am I missing ? ._.[/citation]

Hmmm. It looks like I missed a step: Click the 'CREATE A GAME' button at the bottom right of the screen:

- Start StarCraft 2, and log in to your battle.net account.
- Select 'MULTI PLAYER' button at the top left side of the screen
- Click the 'CREATE A GAME' button at the bottom right of the screen
- In the 'SEARCH BY NAME' search field, type 'toms'.
- Select the 4 player 'Toms Hardware Guide Benchmark' map authored by Cleeve
- Set Game Speed to Normal
- Start Game
- When the game begins, you will immediately see the 'Victory!' message suggesting that the game is over. Click the 'Return to Game' button to begin the benchmark
 
I wish they'd left good enough alone and stuck with the old StarCraft engine and not made us wait a decade for StarCraft II, not to mention making me upgrade my computer just to play an RTS. It's not like they made any graphic-related changes that effect gameplay.

The only 3D rendering of any consequence is zooming in, and who in their right mind does that? You can't even rotate the map (not that you'd want to). Prerendered bitmaps are still fine for this sort of game and leave the heavy hitting hardware to FPS games where it makes a difference.
 
this is a really bad article since the game is simulated and made up by Tom's Hardware, not actually played in the game against others like it should be tested. This means that the cpu has to work much harder since there are a lot more calculations to be done.
 
I played this game myself with all settings maxed out on a 1920x1080 monitor with a gtx 480 and a intel core 2 quad q6600 @ 3.0GHz and I definitely didn't have framerates that low. They stayed above 50 fps.
 
[citation][nom]iEATu[/nom]this is a really bad article since the game is simulated and made up by Tom's Hardware, not actually played in the game against others like it should be tested. This means that the cpu has to work much harder since there are a lot more calculations to be done.[/citation]

It's a fine article, you simply don't understand how the game works. Regardless of wether or not units belong to the AI or to the player, the game must make AI some decisions for all units.

Not to mention, PvE is a valid style of play.

Granted, competitive 'rush' games will have a lot less units than this, but as I said previously I'd rather show a worst-case-scenario than a best-case-scenario where folks assume they have more than they need for every situation.
 
2 x 4870 512 MB on XFire + Phenom II X4 955 + 4 GB RAM and it runs flawlessly with all maxed out @ 1920x1200 resolution.
Plus it's cheaper than most configs that were presented here to claim the title.
 
I'm playing Starcraft 2 on a Pentium 4 running at 3.3Ghz and a Radeon AGP 3850.... with all setting turned off its just fine in anything up to 2v2 with massive battles. Even in 4v4 I can hold my own just not in major combat.
 
[citation][nom]Soldier37[/nom]Really.. all those high specs to play at only 1080, thats pretty worthless! You should try playing at 2560 x 1600 (30 inches) your missing out if not. Thats a 1600p monitor for those that arent in the know, you can get one off ebay easily now for around $700. BTW mine plays just fine with a AMD X6 1090t(6 Core)at 4ghz, 8gb ddr 3, ASUS 5970, Win 7 64bit, 2560 x 1600 maxed on ultra smooth as butter![/citation]

very true I was thinking the same thing when I read that. A triple core slightly helps
 


I believe SC2 only utilizes two cores (please correct me if I am wrong), therefore the extra two cores of an Phenom II X6 would not show much improvement. I would link the Battle.net FAQ that mentions this, but I don't have access to it at work 🙁 .
 
This makes me very very happy with my recent purchase of that exact same 460 card! I run at 1680 x 1050, with high details on an e6300 clocked to 2.80Ghz, ne'er a hiccup in sight. The performance you can get from an entry level processor & mid-range graphics card are insane!
 
[citation][nom]dark_lord69[/nom]I played through the game on high settings @ 1080 X 1920. Since the actual graphical differences between High and Ultra are slight I didn't mind 1 notch lower for better frame rates (although I never tried the Ultra setting).FYI, my systemAMD Phenom II X4 955 Black @ 3.6GHzSapphire HD 487037" LCD HDTV used as a monitor @ 1080pThis system made the game an awesome experience and there is so much more I can do within the game. My only hope is that it will be good enough to run Diablo III by the time that game finally comes out.[/citation]
[citation][nom]enzo matrix[/nom]It's nice to see someone finally include good information as to how they actually tested the game.[/citation]
my system is symilar to yours i hav a 940 be a 4850 nand 4 gb ram on a 42 inch at 1920x1080 ultra everything that can be and aa full up runs smoth as butter
 
Yeah, this test sucks. I run my stuff just fine on Core 2 Quad @ 3.7 with a 4850 Radeon on Win 7 64bit with 6 Gigs of RAM. I'm not buying another video card until a game becomes worthy of it. As it stands, my card can run anything. Bring on Crysis 2.
 
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