At 1920x1200 using the ultra quality settings, anything faster than the old GeForce GTX 260 is a little pointless and that's saying a lot in our opinion. For those better used to extreme resolutions, the newly released GeForce GTX 460 graphics card appears to be the ultimate weapon in StarCraft II. This card was able to match the GeForce GTX 480 and Radeon HD 5870 graphics cards even at 2560x1600. Therefore we can safely and happily conclude that you won't need to spend over $200 to enjoy StarCraft II in all of its glory at any resolution. One major difficulty seemed to be StarCraft II's lack of support for more than two CPU cores...
StarCraft II only takes advantage of dual cores, but still processing power plays a major role in this game. For example, the Core i3 540 processor only has half the L3 cache of the Core i5 750 and this makes the latter 27% faster when comparing the clock for clock data at 3.70GHz.
The extra threads of the Core i7 920 processor are no advantage when compared to the Core i5 750 in this game, but the additional memory capacity and bandwidth is. The Core i7 920 was 11% faster when comparing the clock for clock data at 3.70GHz which is quite significant.
An older processor like the Core 2 Quad Q6600 suffers compared to the other CPUs tested, serving as a bottleneck to a high-end GPU such as the GeForce GTX 480. The Phenom II processors delivered average performance and we saw no real difference between the Phenom II X2 (dual-core) and Phenom II X4 (quad-core processors).
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