Minimum graphics card to run Starcraft II at 1920 x 1080 and ultra high settings

Does anyone have an idea the lowest ati card that will be able to do this? Will the 5650 be able to or will i need a 5850?

 

I think at least a 5850MR, my 5870MR is already only getting an average of 30FPS, sometimes dropping to 20FPS when I mass carriers. 5650MR simply won't be able to handle.

 

is your card the gddr5 version?

 

I don't think there are any 5870MR with GDDR3. But even 30FPS is very smooth though, and even 20FPS is acceptable for SC2.

 

yea you're right other cards have more then 1 memory i thought they all did.

my current laptop tho with dual gtx 280m should provide 30+ fps constantly tho at the full settings?

 

check this out
Benchmark Results: Ultra Quality : StarCraft II Beta: Game Performance Analyzed

the 5670 delivers acceptable performance.
sc2 isn't that intensive of a game.

 

get alteast mobility hd 5850 if you want to play 1920x1080 at ultra high settings

dont even think of turning on anti aliasing because desktop card even struggle on it


also make sure you get a fast processor with high CLOCK SPEED(preferable a fast dualcore cpu like Core™ i5-430M, 2.26-2.53GHz


starcraft 2 scales well with higher clock speed than more cores so a higher clock speed dual core is preferable


this laptop will suite you hardcore starcraft 2 gaming well
MSI GX640


(p.s)
Mobility HD 5870 is almost as fast as a desktop HD 5770
GTX 280m is almost as fast as desktop 8800GTS
desktop GTX 280 vs mobile GTX 280m

 

Interesting that the 260 is close to 5870 (@1920x1200), i guess this game will favor nvidia over ati. Too bad no 285/480 cards to see how they do.

 

That's a graph for desktop 260 and 5870, desktop 260 GTX are very good cards, and I think at 260 and above it's bottlenecked by CPU that's why the FPS doesn't change much, which is proven by the CPU scaling later on.

 

wow, it pretty much scales linearly with cpu clock speed.

 

yeah awesome to see it scales to clock speed without much difference from dual to quad cores

 

The Tomshardware graphs are crap.

StarCraft II Wings of Liberty - Beta Performance - Introduction

 

your link doesn't prove anything?

 

so the HP envy 17 with 1GB gddr5 mobility 5850 and core i5-540 will play it at 1920 x 1080 with ultra settings

 

Judging by the benchmark, should be playable at around 20-25 FPS.

 

It's called look at the benchmarks on the site and compare them to the one's by Tomshardware.

Duh.

Also, this link provides a good look as well.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=113094

 

He mean the benchmark you posted doesn't prove that the ones on tom's hardware are false.

 

all i see is nvidia cards tested with AA and no ati. 8x msaa on ati loses ~25% performance compared to no aa at all

 

I think desktop vs. mobile GPUs/CPUs is throwing people off.

Regardless, the results of the 9800 GT are promising - that card's supposed to be slightly slower than my GTX280m, and it averages 32, minimum 20, so Ultra High should be within my grasp .

I'd like to see some more results with i5 and i7 mobile CPUs (maybe even some C2Ds or C2Qs), that might elucidate the reason we're seeing so much variability between studies (as Random1337 pointed out).

Speaking of Random's links, I'm very hesitant to trust the TeamLiquid link (not that I trust them much to begin with), particularly given that they seem to be believing people who claims that their 9600m GT (that's 9600 m) can run Ultra High. Yeah, right! Not from what I'm hearing folks around these forums say, and not from what I saw when my buddy was running it on his desktop.

 

maybe I should just keep my m17x w/ dual gtx 280m's. yea i get no battery life but i know it will run sc2 at max resolution and max settings at probly 40+fps the envy 17 w/ 5850 will most likely have to make a few sacrifices on the settings to run at a smooth fps at max resolution.

 

Maybe ultra high with 9600M GT at 1024x768 reso lol

 

I guess I should have elaborated.

A lot of people on TeamLiquid.net and other sites have done benchmarks as well and none are as low as the ones done by Tom's hardware. Also if you look at the benchmarks by Tom's Hardware, you'd notice that the upper end has very little change at all, and only some difference showing up with changes in resolution.

Even my personal tests show some completely different results with a 200/200 army battling it out with another 200/200 army. In that scenario my ATI 5850 gets much higher avg FPS with ultra details enabled than their review. So either they accidentally enabled V-Sync or something is really wrong.

 

Different CPUs?

 

Well, if you read at the bottom, they tell you that that's because the CPU bottlenecks...

 

This is BETA. Things are subject to change significantly with final code release. Blizzard indicated that the beta was primarily for server load and customer feedback for balancing of units. Battlefield Bad Company 2 ran like crap on my M11x but final code was significantly improved. I don't know why people even bother debating this atm.

 

SC2 is heavy, heavy on the CPU demand. It'll be bottlenecked by pretty much any mobile CPU.

 

I believe this also.... im worried about my T9600 . It would be great to see tests on laptops gpu and cpu specially, but i doubt any sites will do that.

 

A blizzard game bottlenecked by CPU more than GPU?

Unbelievable.

 

I cleaned up a lot of flame-war posts in this thread . . . please stay on topic. Thank you.

 

It's pretty ridiculous. It's like the shaders are being offloaded to the CPU or something.