NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 – The Super-Affordable Fermi

Of all the games we test, it might be this one that needs no introduction. Back in 1998, Blizzard unleashed what was soon to be one of the most successful RTS titles on the planet, and even as of today, the original is still heavily played all around the world – even in actual competitions. StarCraft II of course had a lot of hype to live up to, and it did, thanks to its intense gameplay and superb graphics.

Manual Run-through: The portion of the game we use for testing is part of the Zero Hour mission, which has us holding fort until we’re able to evacuate. Our saved game starts us in the middle of the mission, and from the get-go, we build a couple of buildings and concurrently move our main units up and around the map. Total playtime lasts about two minutes.

Just Cause 2 might have leaned towards AMD’s graphics cards, but SCII clearly favors NVIDIA’s. Here, our SLI configuration of the GTS 450, which would run about $260, simply dominated the HD 5870, except at the top-end resolution of 2560×1600. And even there, the performance for both were above 50 FPS, so whether you’d actually see the difference or not is the big question.

StarCraft II might have some of the best aesthetic values in current titles, but it can fortunately run on a wide gamut of hardware without requiring you to tone down the details. As such, running 2560×1600 on all of our cards is no problem at all.