StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
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StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a very popular DirectX 9 game released in 2010. Though this game uses an old version of DirectX, the number of textures that can be represented on one screen can push most of the top-end graphics cards to their limits (especially when the graphics settings are set at “Ultra”). StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty uses its own physics engine that is bound to the CPU and thus does not benefit from PhysX.
We tested this game at 1440×900. The quality of the game was set to the “high” preset, disabling both anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. We then used FRAPS to collect the frame rate of a replay on the “Unit Testing” custom map. We used a battle between very large armies to stress the video cards.
Here the integrated graphics processor of the A8-3870K was 75% faster than Core i3-2105’s and 77% faster than the Core i3-2100’s. It was also 7% faster than A8-3850’s. In fact, the performance achieved by these CPUs from AMD will allow you to play this game at the published settings at a very good performance.
When we added a Radeon HD 6570, the video performance of the A8-3870K increased 41 percent. With this video card installed, this CPU was 22% faster than the Core i3-2105 and 24% faster than the Core i3-2100, also with the Radeon HD 6570 installed.
