Ooh…pretty.
Starcraft II looks pretty damn good.
Scratch that.
With everything set to “ultra”, the game looks fantastic for an RTS. Flashes of bright light, patches of dark shadow and the billowing expellations of explosions crowd the screen, to say nothing of the inherent shiny-ness of the Protoss, the gritty look of the ever-under-siege Terrans and the disgustingly, disgustingly oozing Zerg.
The portraits in the lower right-hand corner of the UI are even 3D, and they stare out of the interface, daring you to take them into battle, to use or lose their capabilities.
Even the ambient atmosphere looks great, with lightning storms raging in chasms and critters wandering the landscape, flitting in and out of the haze of battle.
Again – looks great.
Even with a middle-of-the road machine, the game looks good and runs well, with units marching smartly in time and gunfire ringing off the cliff walls of desolate alien landscapes. That’s odd in itself – apparently our three trenchant races have never managed to stumble across another form of intelligent life than them, but instead are doomed to fight in the remnants of alien cities or set up camps directly opposite one another on equally high ground. Sure, it’s RTS convention – but it’s still dumb.
A strange as it may sound, it’s those with higher-end machines that may actually take the hit in terms of graphical goodness, as opposed to those in the creamy central area of graphical sweetness. Blizzard has always designed games so that the greatest number of players on the greatest variance of machines can play them, and for that we give them credit.
The reason we’re hesitant to extend that credit to cover the sale of a multi-million dollar yacht (we’re looking at you here, Ghostcrawler) is because this focus on the middleman means that Blizzard is not pushing the edge of the graphical envelope, and those with cards on the upper edge of the tech spectrum tend to get the short end of the performance stick.
Case in point – ATI Crossfire technology. Following the reasoning that “more cards equals more pretty”, both Nnvidia and ATI went ahead and designed dual-card systems – SLI for Nvidia and Crossfire for ATI. In theory, these cards provide almost double the performance with nary a problem, but theory and practice are not often in the same city, let alone close enough to complain about each other’s lawns.
Right now, a Crossfired Starcraft 2 setup is going to get you two problems. Problem number one is that you’re more than likely going to get middle of the screen horizontal tearing as your camera zips around the ultra-detailed screen at high speeds. This can theoretically be solved with a higher refresh rate or with the use of V-sync, but for those dedicated to crazy-ass fps, V-sync is the devil in synchronized clothing.
The other problem that Crossfirers will encounter is that periodically one or both of their Vespene geysers and half of their minerals will disappear. Not only that, but any of the units that are sent into this “dead zone” will disappear. To top it all off, the dead zone appears randomly on the map, so you won’t know when your units will disappear until it’s too late.
Blizzard is aware of this problem, and it can be solved by either disabling Crossfire from the Catalyst Control Center or by running the game in windowed mode – which also disables Crossfire. Either way, you’re losing out on performance you paid for, in a game that should be able to take advantage of at least some of the awesomness provided by two cards.
Are these the kind of problems most people wish they were having with Starcraft II? That it looked too damn good? Sure, but that’s just the nature of games and gamers.
We want everything perfect, everything slick, everything pretty – all the time.
We don’t just want to blow you up.
We need to look good doing it.
