Gigabyte GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclock Edition 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: None of the cards today were struggling to run the content in Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty. The upper echelon of graphics cards did seem to hit a performance wall at 1280×1024 and were likely held back by the Intel Core I7 930. Once we cranked up the resolution to 1920×1080 performance differences began to show. Both EVGA GeForce GTX 470 Hydro Copper FTW and the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 SOC Edition were at the top, separated by only .1 frames per second followed by the HIS Radeon HD 5870 which was 7% behind the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 470 Super Overclocked Edition.