 Welcome to our StarCraft II performance overview and review and roundup and the results were so shocking that Slick peed himself. That is quite literally what happened. See I can tell because when I put my hand on the stain and smell it, it's most assuredly urine. That's gross dude. That's gross dude. So anyway we're using the latest drivers on both the GeForce and Radeon graphics cards and we're following our new format which is a very exciting format where we take four different price brackets this time about a hundred bucks, about two hundred bucks, about three hundred bucks and about four hundred bucks. So no matter how much you want to spend on a graphics card we're going to tell you what is the optimal solution whether it's from the green team or the red team. Now our StarCraft II benchmark is custom. Slick did some magical whatever he did and he created this play through where the guys fight each other and it's very very intensive so it gives you kind of a worst case scenario. Not necessarily something that you'd observe when you're you know you all have like one hatchery and like you know two zerglings over here. Like that's not what we're looking at. We're looking at the very worst case and right latest drivers so catalyst 13.1 and the Nvidia drivers 313.96. We use only official drivers not beta drivers. You used beta drivers didn't you? Okay well from now on we're only going to use beta drivers. From now on we're only going to use official drivers but this time we used beta drivers so calm down. Anyway so our hundred dollar approximately price point has the Radeon 7770 up against the GeForce GTX 650. So in this case we had an MSI Platinum Edition card and a Sapphire whatever card this is VaporX I think something along those lines. Power Edition? Sure. Power Edition. We do overclock all the cards but we don't take them to the absolute maximum that they can do. We scour the interwebs and we find sort of what 90% of the people who are using these cards are able to attain and we run it those settings because the way we figure it we've done guides about this you should probably be overclocking your card if you own one because that's the right thing to do. So at this particular price bracket the Radeon card was 119 bucks the GeForce card was about 5% cheaper but the 7770 just ran away with it at this price point. You can tell that StarCraft II is not necessarily limited by the actual power of the GPU because you can see that when we step up to a 7870 and a GTX 660 this Radeon number doesn't change but it seems to be more to do with driver optimizations. So in this case the Red Team card was a little bit less expensive than the Green Team card so the Green Team had a 660 I believe this is our 660 yep 660 Twin Frozer and then it was a 7870 for the Red Team now our 7870 happens to be a dog of an overclocker so this is probably kind of a worst case scenario but once again the Red Team comes away by about looks like about 20% in terms of the performance delta. Okay so our next price band is $300 so we've got the 7950 up against the 660 Ti the 7950 wins by about 10% but notice here guys and this is at ultra and extreme presets 1080p no anti-aliasing. Notice here though that this is only a 10% difference and this number is still pretty much the same as the 7770. Finally we get up into the very upper echelon cards the 7970 versus the 670 where finally for whatever reason AMD's graphics cards are able to push a few more frames out in this game and the 670 hits that number around 64 FPS where the Radeon cards were performing up till this time so it's still about 10-15% slower. So what does this mean? Basically that StarCraft 2 is purely optimization driven in terms of how the game runs on one card versus another also that we are extremely CPU limited on the Radeon side to the point where you can pay $400 for a graphics card or you can pay $100 for a graphics card to run this game and you're going to end up with pretty much the same results. So thank you for checking out this video don't forget to check out the video which I've annotated in this video showing you the benchmarking procedure that we use for StarCraft 2 so you can replicate it on your own system find out what's up. The test bench that we use is our 3930K overclocked to 4 GHz test bench. We pulled out the RAM because we're using it for something else right now but the point is it has 16 gigs of RAM and OCZ vertex 4 SSD and that is pretty much all she wrote. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews and other computer videos and I can't wait to get this button shirt off this is just horrible just like why am I wearing this? Thank you, Have a great day.