AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 CrossFire Video Card Review

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty

StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is a military science fiction real-time strategy video game developed by Blizzard Entertainment for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. A sequel to the award-winning 1998 video game StarCraft, the game was released worldwide on July 27, 2010. It is split into three installments: the base game with the subtitle Wings of Liberty, and two upcoming expansion packs, Heart of the Swarm and Legacy of the Void. StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has had a successful launch, selling three million copies worldwide in less than a month.

The game StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty has no internal benchmarking tools built into the game engine, so we recorded a scene and played it back at normal speed and measured performance with FRAPS. The screen capture above shows the system settings that we were using for StarCraft II. Notice we are running the graphics quality and textures set to Ultra and maxed out everything in the menu. We did not manually enable AA in the drivers though, as we wanted to keep testing simple and consistent to the choices offered in the games settings menus.

Benchmark Results: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is fairly easy on video cards and all of the current mainstream graphics cards don’t struggle to playback this games content smoothly. In this benchmark we found the Radeon HD 6870/6850 performing faster than their now ‘old’ counterparts the Radeon HD 5870/5850. NVIDIA GeForce cards do well on this benchmark though and the factory overclocked EVGA GeForce GTX 460 768MB SuperClocked video card made short work of the Radeon HD 6800 series cards.