StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm Benchmark GPU

[csbin]

http://gamegpu.ru/rts-/-strategii/starcraft-ii-heart-of-the-swarm-test-gpu.html

Playing StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm is better processor architecture is optimized for Intel, and showed that more impressive results in terms of AMD

Game can download only 2 CPU cores, more than two cores game obviously useless. And this is explained by a distinct advantage over Intel AMD. What was the most surprising, is the fact that the game is on Intel technology automatically disables HT, most likely to avoid unnecessary problems

 

[Homeles]

Pretty typical for a Blizzard game. They've always favored Intel by a wide margin.

 

[Anteaus]

Also worth mentioning that the SC2 engine is old and was originally designed for single or dual core. The graphics might be polished to a sheen but the game engine itself was already aging when WOL was released and I doubt they are going to use a newer engine for the third game. As a result most people get very good performance out of it which I believe is what Blizzard was aiming for.

 

[Homeles]

People can trash talk Blizzard all that they'd like, but the fact of the matter is that they're absolutely fantastic when it comes to supporting new standards. E.g., 64 bit support and DX 11 support for WoW. Wish other devs did this, although it's probably a money problem.

 

[Ventanni]

I'd love to see Blizzard support 4-8 threads with SC2, but given its relative performance, it seems to play just fine even with a Core 2 Duo or Core i3. The game seems to also heavily favor Nvidia hardware over AMD, but heck, I played it on my HD4000 @ 1080p and it played just fine (with the shaders turned down of course).

It may only support 2 threads, but it'll play on just about anything.

 

[StrangerGuy]

People can trash talk Blizzard all that they'd like, but the fact of the matter is that they're absolutely fantastic when it comes to supporting new standards. E.g., 64 bit support and DX 11 support for WoW. Wish other devs did this, although it's probably a money problem.

D3 looked and ran like shit on a OCed 2500K/5850. At least their old games like WC3 have mediocre graphics for their time but still ran well on minimal hardware.

 

[Yuriman]

D3 looked and ran like shit on a OCed 2500K/5850. At least their old games like WC3 have mediocre graphics for their time but still ran well on minimal hardware.

Ran great on 3570k + HD4870. I turned shadows down a notch and framerates stayed pegged at 60.

 

[mikeymikec]

@ OP

I'm confused. You mentioned Heart of the Swarm then posted WoL benchmarks. I can't remember where I read it but doesn't HotS have better threading support than WoL?

 

[inf64]

Look at the poor Phenom II X6/X4, ridiculously low scores. I guess they didn't bother to optimize for AMD at all,it's practically a miracle PD does so good in light of such a poor K10 scores.

 

[kevinsbane]

@ OP

I'm confused. You mentioned Heart of the Swarm then posted WoL benchmarks. I can't remember where I read it but doesn't HotS have better threading support than WoL?

Definitely not in multiplayer.

 

[RyanGreener]

It's been like this since the Wings of Liberty days, haha. Only runs best on 2-4 threads and on Intel/nVidia hardware.

 

[KingFatty]

Look at the poor Phenom II X6/X4, ridiculously low scores. I guess they didn't bother to optimize for AMD at all,it's practically a miracle PD does so good in light of such a poor K10 scores.

So there may be a good explanation here. SC2 particularly improved a lot when increasing the CPU-NB speed on the Phenom II chips. However, the changes aren't as much for the FX chips.

I wonder if that has something to do with it? If the CPU-NB setting on those Phenoms was bumped up, it could increase by what 10-20%? I'm almost speculating that perhaps the FX chips sort of achieved the equivalent of that, so they look better in SC2. But then you won't see as much of a bump when you increase the CPU-NB on the FX chips?

 

[hyrule4927]

@ OP

I'm confused. You mentioned Heart of the Swarm then posted WoL benchmarks. I can't remember where I read it but doesn't HotS have better threading support than WoL?

The charts are mislabeled on the source site, but if you look at the actual article, it is definitely Heart of the Swarm that they are testing.

 

[inf64]

So there may be a good explanation here. SC2 particularly improved a lot when increasing the CPU-NB speed on the Phenom II chips. However, the changes aren't as much for the FX chips.

I wonder if that has something to do with it? If the CPU-NB setting on those Phenoms was bumped up, it could increase by what 10-20%? I'm almost speculating that perhaps the FX chips sort of achieved the equivalent of that, so they look better in SC2. But then you won't see as much of a bump when you increase the CPU-NB on the FX chips?

I doubt it's the NB/L3 clock issue. FX8350 has huge advantage over 1100T, 53% higher min fps and 65% higher avg. fps. That's with 50% less FP units (4 vs 6). Note that this game utilities 2-4 threads max so number of threads per chip means nothing in this case. It's performance per thread that counts(cache seems to have a big influence on performance of different CPUs in this test).