Starcraft II goes Gold!

[wibod]

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/malus

[IskatuMesk]

Also, what I just saw, it seems that the graphics are quite low for today's standards.

Yeah, you're just a bad troll. Way to blow your cover bro. Now no one's ever gonna take ya seriously ever again.

[Demoneater]

@wibod: Malus has multiple meanings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus-Malus

@Iskatu: You might call me a troll I call me myself a man of priniciples.

(plus, you should admit, that a serious troll would be way more aggressive)

And the graphics aren't really SUCH good for today's games. They aren't totally bad, but just out of time IMHO. While I have to admit that SC II has nice "faces" (I assume they will be only used during cinematics) and really much details, this isn't all good graphics are about.

I stated my opinion and points about SC II and stayed polite, so just don't call me a troll for stating my opinion civilized.

[Frozty]

What settings are you playing the game on? And have you considered that AA has not been added yet?

[IskatuMesk]

Uh, sc2's graphics are only beat by a very small handful of games right now, almost all of them being console titles, and none of them having engines that can sustain what sc2 can. Yeah, the cartoony look is ugly, but the graphics are still higher detail and quality than almost any PC game released. They're only bested by Earth 2160, UT3, some random Metro game HKS was playing, Brood War, ect.

Troll.

[UntamedLoli]

Know what I see on the various tech websites I visit? SC2's graphics are out-dated/should look more like crysis for a 2010 game.

RTS games don't need and can't use that kind of detail and whats even more BS is all the crying over the lack of AA which was only recently implemented on both sides in driver hacks using SSAA (Super Sampling) that will even cripple my 5870 using 4x.

The only real issue SC2 has right now is the map publishing/hosting disaster and that it barely uses half of 1 of 2 cores on my 3.6ghz C2D for not being multicore and stalling constantly with 6 Insane AI players late game.

[DrumsofWar]

Is there a reason why both Warcraft III and Starcraft 2 both suddenly go spastic at medium/high unit counts?

[IskatuMesk]

Define spastic.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Is there a reason why both Warcraft III and Starcraft 2 both suddenly go spastic at medium/high unit counts?

Guess it might be due to taking more CPU resources and such. Pathfinding seems to take considerable juice since when 1000 zerglings seen at once (in a map test) are immobile, I easily get 15-25 FPS but the second I make a good 200-300 of them move and such, it can easily drop to 7-9 FPS. That's relatively the same results in my case regardless if I got the lowest settings or my usual (mid-high, not ultra) ones.

On top of it, it doesn't help that WC3 still only use one core and SC2 only uses 2 cores (one at 100% and the other more or less at 50% usually).

I tend to not hold too much hope that SC2 that will use more than 2 cores or if it does it would be only at the 1st or 2nd expansion at best if we base it on WoW's change from 1 core to 2 cores.

EDIT :

By the way, my computer specs are the following :
Phenom AMD Quad-core 2.2 mhz
Radeon HD 4670 (1 GB)
4 GB RAM
Windows XP SP3 (still at DX9 but shouldn't hurt that much not using DX10)

So while it's not a top of the line computer, it's far from being scrap (minus according to Mesk).

[IskatuMesk]

Yeah having a multi-core processor hurts you with sc2. Supposedly the i7 is supposed to perform very well but in my experience sc2 is one of the worst performing games I have right now.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

Also from what I read and such, video card-wise, Nvidia cards seems to outperform a full level above than ATI cards for SC2 due to SC2's lack optimizations for ATI cards (that otherwise would perform more or less equally).

However, if you have a Nvidia card and you don't change a specific INI setting or two, your Nvidia card is very likely fry due to uncapped FPS for "non-game" stuff (campaign cinematics, game lobby, etc.)

That's a thing I am kind of surprised that Blizzard didn't release a mini-patch asap (when they started to hear it) to add those INI changes to prevent frying Nvidia cards ... they only pretty much said how to just manually edit the specific INI file by ourselves and that's it. Talk about cheap Blizzard support for something that serious ESPECIALLY when they knew the problem, knew a cheap solution to fix it AND could have made a mini-patch to do it for all users.

[Lavarinth]

It'd be nice if ATI optimized themselves, for once. They don't update their drivers enough to begin with.

The reason Blizzard did not patch those 'issues' is because StarCraft 2 cannot under any circumstances 'fry' your video card.

[IskatuMesk]

SC2 is CPU dependent.

[UntamedLoli]

SC2 is heavily dependant on the CPU, even having a quad core helps just not as much as going from single to dual.

[Ricky_Honejasi]

SC2 is CPU dependent.

I wasn't too sure back then but it does become more and more obvious to me after personal tests and such.

It'd be nice if ATI optimized themselves, for once. They don't update their drivers enough to begin with.

The reason Blizzard did not patch those 'issues' is because StarCraft 2 cannot under any circumstances 'fry' your video card.

I do agree that ATI is quite lacking driver-wise although in SC2, it seems it's worse.

But for the issues, it IS an issue when some sites did have it on their main pages or had an article about it :

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/201 ... amerates/1

http://www.dailytech.com/Hot+Starcraft+ ... e19224.htm

Blizzard can't find every issue until it's "too late" or might be far from entirely to blame (as in much more from the manufacturer). However, I still find it a bit lacking from Blizzard's part in terms of limiting that specific issue (such as a patch to change the INI to a 60 FPS cap rather than letting some GPUs going into 300+).

Some people's cards did fry a few days after playing Starcraft 2 and the worse is more people might have fried cards due the issue (unless it became truly fixed at this point).