Introduction

It was such a long time ago I can’t even remember the first time I played Starcraft. StarCraft was also the first RTS (Real Time Strategy) I ever played. Problem was after five years of playing I grew tired of it. Sure I would install the game every once in a while to suppress my desires but it just wasn’t the same. I guess the major problem was not the game play itself since it will always change, it was the graphics. The graphics became more and more passé as the years progressed and just too far behind the times. I have become accustomed to eye candy and to be blunt there was none.

Enough of that this is not a review of the game but a performance test. After months of delays Starcraft II Wings of Liberty is about to be released. Unless you took part of the Beta testing on Blizzards Battlenet you are probably wondering how will the latest group of DirectX 11 video cards perform? Six of the most recent video cards have been chosen for this test, three from NVIDIA and three from ATI. The cards chosen range from mainstream to high end. All cards were benchmarked on the same saved replay which was twelve minutes in length using Fraps to calculate frames per second. Using the same replay assures that there will be no variables to enhance or change the aspect of the performance test. Fraps was run for the entire replay a total of three times on each video card.

One other difference you will find in this performance review is that the same system was used for all cards. It is true that at Hi Tech Legion we will test based on price point and use appropriate systems within a price point. This time we will step away from our credo in order to provide a prospective on performance increases or decreases based on the price point of the video card itself.