Starcraft 2 Multiplayer GPU Performance Analysis

Hell, It's About Time

After 11 long years of waiting, fans of Blizzard’s Starcraft series can finally revel in the fact that Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty is finally here. The game sees the return of the Terran, Protoss and Zerg races, and focuses on events set four years after Starcraft: Brood War. Needless to say, the game is a massive hit with critics and gamers, receiving rave reviews and having sold over 1.5 million copies within 48 hours of its launch.

Prior to Starcraft 2’s launch, many were curious and some were even worried that their systems would not meet Blizzard’s minimum system requirements for the game. Fortunately, however, Starcraft 2’s minimum system requirements is actually fairly forgiving and even the recommended system requirements is quite modest. Here’s what Blizzard recommends for optimal performance.

• Windows Vista/Windows 7
• Dual-core 2.4GHz Processor
• 2 GB RAM
• 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon HD 3870 or better

Generally speaking, performance on modern games is usually more dependent on your graphics cards rather than processor. So today, we are going to run Starcraft 2 on a selection of the latest graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA to see just what kind of performance you can get, and perhaps help you make a better decision of whether or not to upgrade your existing gaming rig.

Test Setup

To set the ground rules, we're concerned with how the GPU would behave in multiplayer mode where there's much more units to handle than in a single-player campaign mode. To measure performance in Starcraft 2, we’ll be playing a replay of a 4v4 match in Ultra quality setting and recording its frame rate using FRAPS. The 4v4 replay features an intense face-off involving many units, which will tax the system sufficiently to let us have a good idea of how each graphics card will handle Starcraft 2. Such a setup should probably give you an idea of the worst-case scenario that your system should be prepared for if you indeed want to ensure the smoothest game play at the best settings possible at all times.

The game doesn’t support anti-aliasing, but you can force it on the driver level with both NVIDIA and ATI cards. Previously, ATI didn’t support anti-aliasing for Starcraft 2 at all, but it got recently implemented it in their Catalyst 10.7a driver suite.

Here are the specifications of our testbed and also the list of graphics cards tested and the driver versions used:

• Intel Core i7-975 (3.33GHz)
• Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD4P motherboard
• 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 OCZ memory in triple-channel mode
• Seagate 7200.10 200GB SATA hard drive
• Windows 7 Ultimate

From ATI:

• Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.7a)
• Radeon HD 5850 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.7a)
• Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.7a)
• Radeon HD 5670 1GB GDDR5 (Catalyst 10.7a)

From NVIDIA:

• GeForce GTX 480 1536MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
• GeForce GTX 470 1280MB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
• GeForce GTX 460 1GB GDDR5 (ForceWare 258.96)
• GeForce GTX 260+ 896MB GDDR3 (ForceWare 258.96)
• GeForce GTS 250 1GB GDDR3 (ForceWare 258.96)

Results

As the graphs show, with anti-aliasing disabled, majority of the cards achieved very playable frame rates in excess of 50fps. However, we noticed that even the fastest cards were capped out at around 56-57 fps, leading us to believe that the sheer number of units on screen has bogged the CPU down.

With anti-aliasing enabled, performance takes a big hit as some cards such as the Radeon HD 5670 and GeForce GTS 250 exhibited performance dips as drastic as 40%. But since anti-aliasing isn't supported natively by the game and has to be forced at the driver level, hence it begs the question whether or not it's worthwhile to have anti-aliasing. We'll examine that in the following page. 

Power Overwhelming

As we can see from our results, with anti-aliasing disabled, most of the cards achieved a maximum average score of around 56fps, which suggests that, in massive 4v4 battles at least, performance is CPU rather than GPU bound. It seems that no matter how powerful the graphics card, the CPU simply cannot cope with the sheer amount of units that are on screen, and that’s even with a powerful Core i7-975 processor! This finding contradicts the general notion of modern games being more dependent on GPU rather than CPU performance.

With anti-aliasing enabled, performance does suffer, which is as we expected. However, the dip in performance varies from card to card. For powerful cards like ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 and HD 5850 along with NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470, the drop in performance is negligible. Whereas on less powerful cards such as the ATI’s Radeon HD 5770 and NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 260+, the dip in performance is more appreciable and can be as drastic as a 33% drop in frame rate count. Going down the ladder, on even lesser powerful cards like the mid-range Radeon HD 5670 and GeForce GTS 250, enabling anti-aliasing can result in as much as a 50% drop in performance.

So the question is: do you need anti-aliasing? To answer that, let us first look at screen shots of the game with and without anti-aliasing. Images on the left are without anti-aliasing, while those on the right are with anti-aliasing. See if you can spot the difference.

From the screen shots, we can see that the images with anti-aliasing are noticeably smoother, especially from the screenshot of the Protoss Colossus. However, while the differences are noticeable from these screenshots, during normal game-play, it was very hard to make out the difference. Hence, anti-aliasing is probably not necessary unless unless you are a stickler when it comes to graphics or if you have a sufficiently powerful graphics card to afford the eye-candy.

That said, it does reveal that most of today’s mid to top tier graphics cards are more than capable of tackling Starcraft 2 (without AA). If you have anything that's above a Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTX 260+, then you have nothing to worry about even in the most intense scenes. For those with less powerful cards like the Radeon HD 5670 or GeForce GTS 250, it might be a good idea to tone down the graphics settings a notch or run at a lower resolution to get even better frame rates.

Having said that, to further expand on our findings, we have a future article planned that will examine exactly what kind of setup you’ll need to run the various graphics settings in Starcraft 2 comfortably. Stay tuned for more in-depth analysis.

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