AMD Radeon HD 6870 & HD 6850

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.

StarCraft II might have a massive fanbase, but unfortunately, graphical detail doesn’t quite scale with that. At completely maxed-out settings, both of AMD’s cards could handle any resolution, straight up to 2560×1600. It’s important to note that anti-aliasing would increase the load on these cards quite dramatically, but as a general rule we don’t benchmark with AA if we have to force it through the driver panel, to avoid any inconsistent results in case any GPU vendor wants to get a little crafty.

As you probably expected, our results from the 2560×1600 graph carried over into our best playable table.