So I got to sit down with the beta...

And I am happy to say that I loved it! :)

Sadly it was my brother in-law's beta and I was only able to get a couple of games in.

First game I played as Terran vs a Zerg player.

The music sounded pretty tight a lot like something you would hear from the firefly series.

I started off on the scrapyard and went the usual Terran choke and mech for hellions. By the time I was able to get through the rocks with a force strong enough, my opponent had already nydus wormed / baneling spammed my base. Then came the roaches. My first ever SC2 game and I was spanked into oblivion... And to be honest.. I never thought it would feel so good to be raped as hard as I was.

2nd game was alittle better..

Played my SC1 Pro race, Protoss.

Squared off against another zerg player.

Started off with a build similar to what I used in SC1 with some obvious modifications. Went for a couple early zealots into stalkers. Then I went down the robo tech branch, got observers on the field. Opponent was Queen/Hydra abusing. This time I was using blink micro in conjunction with colossi. The stalkers basically applied the lube while the colossi proceeded to violate my enemy.

Sadly after this game I had to leave but, after waiting so long, I finally can rest easy and say this IS Starcraft 2.

There are some differences of course, and alot of balancing to be done, however I feel that Blizzard designed this well. Also there is nothing any video or stream is going to do to justify this game @ ultra setting optimized for your monitor. The funny thing is, when you zoom in, the building structure and unit design seems so simple, but when you back out, you can see all of the detail bloom. It shows how well the dev team really flashed out the game without making it require a ton of system resources.. And that is another thing..

The system I played on had..

Core2 Duo E6550 2.3ghz
2GB 800Mhz DDR2
Geforce 8800GT

1900X800 I believe

Solid 70-90 FPS in Ultra mode, no hicups, no slowdowns.

So, rest easy, it works well on a number of systems.

see people? You don't need a 1gb video card to play ultra mode. Nor do you need a quad core i7 with 8 gigs of ram.

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Originally Posted by RedPineApple

The stalkers basically applied the lube while the colossi proceeded to violate my enemy.

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lol, most epic description of any strategy EVER!

It's unfortunate that you didn't make it into beta yourself - I'm actually in the process of broadening my chances of getting into the next wave (MORE B.NET ACCOUNTS FTW!)

knew pretty much from the start that it wouldent require that much from a computer blizzard really loves to make it easy to handle for most system.


i actualy managed to play world of warcraft back in 2005 whit a compaq computer from 2000 with a ge force 2 card .

and the really nice thing is that they get it to look dam good many places also

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Originally Posted by EvilGenius

lol, most epic description of any strategy EVER!

I'm actually in the process of broadening my chances of getting into the next wave (MORE B.NET ACCOUNTS FTW!)

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I must admit I already did the same thing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wankey

see people? You don't need a 1gb video card to play ultra mode. Nor do you need a quad core i7 with 8 gigs of ram.

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dude dont be so sure, on ultra game eats processor and gpu like a cake, ram not so much. was surprised actually by that. anyone playing on 1920 1080 on ultra will tell u cpu usage and gpu heat is sky high ..

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anyone playing on 1920 1080 on ultra will tell u cpu usage and gpu heat is sky high ..

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I don't have the tools to test heat specifically, but I certainly haven't seen any indication that my i5 Core or GTS 250 is particularly stressed by SC2's Ultra settings.

That's Blizzard's MO, gaming that's easy on the resources. We tend to forget that original SC was made to run on a 486 when the world already moved up to pentium/pentium II.

Well it is hard to explain.. I cannot express how amazing of a job the art team did with the skins. Basically what they did was apply high res skins to low res textures. Similar to what the Unreal Engine 3 does but not as over the top. I tried playing the game on the lowest settings just for giggles.. It looks worse then Command and Conquer 64, but it still makes the game viable for people with 286 machines and below.

I also have a friend of mine that ran the game on a laptop 9300M, 4 gigs, 2.0 ghz processor perfectly on med/high settings. Fact is, despite how the game looked in pics and videos, it really is a completely different vibe once you actually load the game up (aside from the obvious fact that you are actually playing) like the textures and doodads don't feel as blown out and as over polished as it looks at first glance (which isnt a bad thing). And the one thing I was happy about, I didn't have the slightest problem distinguishing my army. I was able to keep up well with the games new pace, and unlike some others, I felt the zoom was just fine. I think zooming the camera out further will take away from the game, but that is my opinion.

Anyway, enough rambling for me. I hope to get my own beta key soon! And I would like to thank SClegacy and the community for allowing me to come on here and share moments of pain, agony, but also joy and excitement!

Good luck in beta guys!

I think the camera is too close, which makes the units a bit bigger. It should be floated just a tiny bit.

i cant get the beta =(

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Wankey

see people? You don't need a 1gb video card to play ultra mode. Nor do you need a quad core i7 with 8 gigs of ram.

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I don't believe that. Blizzard would not bluntly state the requirements if it were not true.

You can set the textures at a higher level, but you risk Texture Thrashing and complications. You can have a 128mb, or 512mb card and set a games textures higher than you "Should" and still "Run the game". But if it's too huge of a difference, it may cause problems. I've experienced this in lots of FPS games where I used to just blindly jack up the textures.

Also , I think in today's modern OS's and etc - they somehow have added your pagefile or ram into video ram? I don't know, but my computer tells me my 5770 1GB has 2.8GB of video ram...

http://i570.photobucket.com/albums/s...p/262f7244.jpg

I think that the new windows 7 and even vista caches your regular ram and adds upon video ram once the dedicated GDDR3/GDDR5 RAM is exhausted in buffering tasks before output, hence slower but available RAM is made use of to add to your video RAM.

That means it's great and I can run my GTX260 core216 896MB card on this game with Ultra settings! Awesome!!

Spychi if you're reading this man! I am one happy camper - my dual core AMD at 2.3GHz is still sufficient! AND I am able to soft OC it to 2.6GHz :D



I think Memory use priority in windows for video is now like:

GDDR3/5 >> DDR2/3 RAM available and cached >> Pagefile Virtual Memory space (HDD speed)

There is no reason to play SC2 in ultra. High works just dandy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mgcemir

dude dont be so sure, on ultra game eats processor and gpu like a cake, ram not so much. was surprised actually by that. anyone playing on 1920 1080 on ultra will tell u cpu usage and gpu heat is sky high ..

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Hands on experiences tells us otherwise

That's a little weird, I have

E6750 @ 2.67 Ghz
2 GB DDR2 Ram
ATI 4850
Windows XP

And I'm stuck with 60ish fps in 1024*768 resolution with ultra settings. Sure I can't get into the game, but at the main log in screen that's what I see.

I really did expect it to be higher according to such a resolution.

And I don't know why but this game BY FAR uses the most amount ram I guess, I saw someone said there was like 1.2 GB ram usage yesterday on his computer.