MSI N550GTX-Ti Cyclone OC Video Card Review

StarCraft II

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a very popular DirectX 9 game that was 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.

As this game is a very competitive and widespread “e-sport,” many LAN cafés and competitions will be building systems to run this game at high frame rates, but at lower graphics settings. For gamers that play StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty at a higher level, “Ultra” graphics settings can be a hindrance due to clutter. Due to this, the more popular video cards for this game will be the mid-range cards.

We tested this game at 1680×1050. The quality of the game was set to the high preset and the textures were also set to high. We used the NVIDIA and ATI consoles to force both Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering at 4x. 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.