NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI versus ATI Radeon HD 5770 CrossFire

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 a very popular game today and, as you can see, both the Radeon HD 5770 and GeForce GTS 450 can easily run the title with cranked up in-game image quality settings. By adding a second card for SLI or CrossFire the game’s FPS was well above 100FPS on average. NVIDIA was faster when it came to a single card and scaled 18% better in SLI than the ATI solution did in CrossFire. Seeing the NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 SLI setup scale at 90% over a single GTS 450 is what we want to see when you add a second card to your system!