Closing Thoughts
Multiple Monitors and Eyefinity/SurroundIf you’ve been following PC Perspective at all recently then you know that we love us some AMD Eyefinity and NVIDIA Surround. Three monitor gaming, or hell even six with AMD’s Eyefinity 6 Edition graphics card, is really a cool feature and one that I am continuing to push for developer support on. Blizzard, however, apparently has other plans for StarCraft II.
Blizzard has stated over and over that SC2 was built for competitive game play at its core. Thus you cannot “scroll out” to view more of the field of play even though everything is rendered in a 3D model in this iteration of the game engine and it would be possible technically. Also because of this Blizzard has no current plans to support triple monitor, landscape resolutions. Displays will only run at 4:3 or 16:9/16:10 options which does mean you can run three portrait panels like so:
While I didn’t take the time to line up the displays properly before taking this picture, playing StarCraft II at 3600×1920 was pretty cool. I don’t know if Blizzard will ever go back on their stance to support other non-standard resolutions (maybe with another version of the engine that is for non-competitive use only?) but I know that PC Perspective would truly love to see more of what is going on in our SC2 matches. Trust me, I need all the help I can get!
Performance
In my testing it seems obvious that StarCraft II was built to be compatible with a very wide range of PC and Mac hardware and as such we see it perform very well across even moderately priced graphics cards. The new GeForce GTX 460 1GB, with its $229 standard price tag, looks like a perfect solution for this title as it even allows you to run at 4xAA settings and maintain a good overall experience. The higher priced cards do well for you if happen to have a 30-in panel but otherwise they don’t look like they are going to be required.
NVIDIA definitely has the edge in terms of performance with StarCraft II as it sits now before the game’s release. This can of course change, but based on my conversations with both NVIDIA and ATI I don’t expect it to waver very much. Looking at the GTX 460 against the HD 5830, the NVIDIA option won hands down, continuing the trend we saw with the GTX 460 launch review. The GTX 480 also outperforms the HD 5870 though the differences are somewhat lessened by the CPU-limited nature of the SC2 engine based on my testing.
Anti-aliasing is another bonus for NVIDIA card users who pick up SC2 on launch day as it is something that only they will have unless ATI’s driver team really gets on the ball and can integrate support in the next week or so.
Blizzard’s Take on AA and 3D
Gaming website IGN recently did an interview with StarCraft II developers and got this nugget:
To close, we got a little superficial and delved into graphics. Those who’ve played the beta (or just watched the videos) know that it looks great, even on a mid-range machine, but will we be able to anti-alias the boxed game when it’s released?
“No; but we will be releasing 3D in the first few months, for those Nvidia cards and screens that support it,” Chris states, before we quickly pursue Nvidia’s presence at the event, and ask about those players running ATI cards. We receive a stock but believable response: “we’re optimising for all systems.”
A satisfied note-pad in hand, we pursue the anti-aliasing question just one more time. No promises made, but it could certainly be done as a future update – again improving the game during its life – as could numerous other graphical upgrades as technology advances, and the median hardware gets faster.
“No; but we will be releasing 3D in the first few months, for those Nvidia cards and screens that support it,” Chris states, before we quickly pursue Nvidia’s presence at the event, and ask about those players running ATI cards. We receive a stock but believable response: “we’re optimising for all systems.”
A satisfied note-pad in hand, we pursue the anti-aliasing question just one more time. No promises made, but it could certainly be done as a future update – again improving the game during its life – as could numerous other graphical upgrades as technology advances, and the median hardware gets faster.
So it seems that while the game doesn’t support AA for now, it could in the future. Also, Blizzard seems to approve of the 3D technologies like NVIDIA 3D Vision and say here that it will support that feature in the “first few months” after release.
Closing Thoughts
Let’s be honest, even if you were angry about the idea of having to wait for two expansion packs to get the full three-race campaign and story, you were still going to pick up StarCraft II. And now you know, at least to a certain degree, how your system will handle it based on our graphics cards testing today. SC2 was a lot of fun to play during the beta and with the release just a handful of days away, it could be a very unproductive month of August.
In terms of gaming performance, it would look like most of our readers won’t be forced to upgrade their GPU to play StarCraft II. There are some noticeable benefits going to a newer NVIDIA graphics cards that offers the ability to play with forced anti-aliasing enabled that you won’t get with AMD’s options or older/slower NVIDIA ones. At basic settings though, even the 2+ year old HD 4850 can get the job done which should make gamers happy even in upgrade-dependent hardware companies wish for a bit more.
UPDATE 8/2/10 for Catalyst 10.7 beta release that enabled AA for ATI graphics cards
Overall the new Catalyst 10.7 beta driver did exactly what we asked but no more: allow the gamer the CHOICE to enable AA in StarCraft II to find their best overall gaming experience. Non-AA-enabled performance hasn’t changed for the Radeon cards and they are still notably slower than their similarly priced NVIDIA counterparts and the same ~50% performance drop we saw by enabling AA on the GeForce cards was witnessed with the 10.7 beta driver for Radeon GPUs.
I definitely applaud AMD for stepping up to the plate and answering the call of their customers (and us!) so quickly but both they and NVIDIA (or hey, how about YOU Blizzard?) have some work to do to improve AA performance with what is likely the biggest selling PC game in years.
