Tom's Hardware just put up a pretty interesting article doing some analysis on the SC2 beta and hardware performance, and it appears to be mostly CPU-bound at this point (still beta). Basically you'll need a dual core faster than 2.0 GHz and you should be good to run on the highest settings. I'd wager that you could build/buy a PC for between $400-600 that should run it on Ultra settings. If you've already got the OS, cut $150 out of that price. I'd also say 3 year old PCs should be able to run it pretty well.
Can anybody in the beta post their specs and how well it runs? Partially to do some fact checking and help me decide what to put in a friend's HTPC.
SC2 Beta Hardware Analysis
" @Jeffsekai:@sodiumCyclops: Thanks guys! I'm darn impressed and it sounds like Tom's ratings are pretty far off. "Unless the above people had AA off.
AA has a pretty big effect on graphical quality and in turn is rather taxing. From Tom's 1920x1200 4xAA numbers it would seem this game is GPU-bound. I'm also rather surprised with their numbers, apparently this game runs almost as poorly as Crysis which gets 16fps at the same settings (whereas this game gets 21). Will have to see it for myself but from their numbers it doesn't look like anything short of a 5970 will be able to run it at 60fps at high settings :/.
Though, Tom's had to force AA through driver so perhaps the developers will include an optimized AA option upon release.
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