Starcraft 2 Gaming Graphics Card Benchmark Showdown Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
929 words · ~4 min read
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Welcome to our Starcraft 2 performance overview and review and Roundup and the
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results were so shocking that slick peed
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himself that is quite literally what happen see I can tell because when I put
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my hand on the stain and smell it it's most assuredly
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urine that's gross dude okay so anyway we're using the latest
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drivers on both the GeForce and Radeon graphics cards and we're following our
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new format which is a very exciting format where we take four different
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price brackets this time about a 100 bucks about 200 bucks about 300 bucks
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and about 400 bucks so no matter how much you want to spend on a graphics
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card we're going to tell you what is the optimal solution whether it's from the
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Green Team or the red team now our Starcraft 2 Benchmark is custom slick
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did some re magical whatever he did and
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he created this playthrough where the guys fight each other and it's very very
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intensive so it gives you kind of a worst case scenario not necessarily
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something that you'd observe when you're you know you all have like one Hatchery
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and like you know two zerglings over here like that's not what we're looking
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at we're looking at the very worst case and uh right latest drivers so Catalyst
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13.1 and the NVIDIA drivers 31 13.96%
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you used beta drivers didn't you okay well from now on we're only going to use
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beta drivers or from now on we're only going to use official drivers but this
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time we used beta drivers so calm down anyway so our $100 approximately price
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point has the Radeon 7770 up against the GeForce GTX 650 so
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in this case we had an MSI Platinum Edition card and a sapphire uh whatever
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card this is Vapor X I think something along those lines power Edition sure
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power Edition um we do overclock all the cards but we don't take them to the
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absolute maximum that they can do we scour the interwebs and we find sort of
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what 90% of the people who are using these cards are able to attain and we
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run it those settings because the way we figure it we've done guides about this
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you should probably be overclocking your card if you own one because that's the
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right thing to do so at this particular price bracket the radon card was 119
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bucks the GeForce card was about % cheaper but the
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7770 just uh ran away with it at this
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price point um you can tell that Starcraft 2 is not necessarily limited
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by the um by the actual power of the GPU
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because you can see that when we step up to a 7870 and a GTX 660 this radon
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number doesn't change but it seems to be more to do with driver optimizations so
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in this case the red team card was a little bit less expensive than the Green
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Team card so the green team had a 660 I
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believe this is our 660 yep 660 twin frozer and then it was a 7870 for the
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red team now r7870 happens to be a dog of an overclocker so this is probably
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kind of a worst case scenario but um
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once again the red team comes Away by about looks like about 20% in terms of
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the performance Delta okay so our next price band
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is $300 so we've got the 79 up against
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the 660 Ti the 7950 wins by about 10%
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but notice here guys and this is at Ultra and extreme presets 1080p no anti-
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eling uh notice here though that this is only a 10% difference and this number is
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still pretty much the same as the 7770 finally we get up into the very
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upper echelon cards the 7970 versus the 670 where finally for whatever reason uh
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AMD's graphics cards are able to push a few more frames out this game um and the
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670 hits that number around 64 FPS where
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the radon cards were performing up till this time so it's still about 10 15%
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slower so what does this mean uh basically that Starcraft 2 is purely
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optimization driven in terms of how the game runs on one card versus another
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also that we are extremely CPU limited
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on the radio side to the point where you can pay $400 for a graphics card or you
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can pay $100 for a graphics card to run this game and you're going to end up
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with pretty much the same results so
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thank you for checking out this video don't forget to check out the video
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which I've annotated in this video showing you the benchmarking procedure
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that we use for Starcraft 2 so you can replicate it on your own system find out
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what's up the test bench that we use is our 3930k overclock to 4 GHz test bench
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uh we pulled out the RAM because we're using it for something else right now but the point is it has 16 gigs of RAM
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an ocz Vertex 4 SSD and and that is
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pretty much all she wrote don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech tips more unboxings reviews and other computer
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videos and I can't wait to get this button shirt off this is just horrible
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just like why am I wearing this