StarCraft 2 Graphics Requirements Confirmed

18th Aug 2008 09:30 PM GMT | Kalos | 1 comments
Kalos' Chronicles >> StarCraft 2 Graphics Requirements Confirmed



Blizzard and SIGGRAPH 08

Perhaps one of the most in depth and revealing looks at the upcoming StarCraft II's graphics engine has been released by Blizzard, without anyone so much as noticing.

This is because it is in fact a highly technical paper released at SIGGRAPH this year, and not designed for the general public or to be used as PR. It is designed for developers to transfer methods, ideas, and uses of techniques in producing the increasing complex graphics we are used to.

While the following analysis is not as long as I'd prefer a full Tech Chronicle article to be, it is shows some very important information including things that perhaps the studio did not want to give away, even if it is far too complicated for some of the paper to be understood by anyone outside of a major games developer studio. But as the following section proves, there can be plenty to gather from this release, and some valuable tech information is evident such as what graphics cards StarCraft II is designed for.



Supported Graphics Cards Revealed

Either by accident or some courtesy towards AMD (more on that aspect further down), Blizzard's own Dominic Filion and Rob McNaughton have left a particularly telling section in their released work that perhaps gives away more information than what Blizzard would formally release to the public. As recently as May this year Blizzard have repeatedly been denying all leaks and announcements of 'official' system requirements as speculation or outright lies, such as the "leaked" StarCraft 2 system requirements in the incident with the Spanish magazine Micromania some months ago.

However, the following reads from this article written by the boys in blue themselves:

	Blizzard Quote:
	For Starcraft II, we wanted to maximize compatibility with less capable systems to ensure hassle‐free game play for as broad a player base as possible. Yet we also wanted to utilize the full potential of any available hardware to ensure the game’s looks were competitive. This meant supporting a wide range of hardware, from ATI Radeon 9800/NVIDIA GeForce FX’s to the ATI Radeon HD 4800s and NVIDIA GeForce G200s

This is in line with information provided by Xordiah in QA session 13 that the game required Pixel Shader 2.0 support. My article last month, StarCraft 2 System Requirements, contained my analysis in which it became clear that in terms of the GeForce series, the FX line was the bottom grade. This appears to be complete confirmation, the graphical situation was as I expected. I appear to have been near dead on regarding ATI Radeon cards as well, my prediction of a 9700 being considered minimum only just below the Radeon 9800 stated above.

Sadly if you're expecting total confirmation of all the specifications listed in my first article, you're not in luck today, but this has been a major breakthrough and allow people to plan their hardware purchases with a little more reassurance of compatibility with Blizzard's next up and coming game. We are going to follow this closely, and you can ask any questions you want about this, or other probable system requirements for StarCraft II or Diablo III in my own StarCraft 2 tech forum.



Titbits and other info

Reading though some parts of the article will send many people, including myself at some parts, heads spinning. However, much of the useful information can be gathered within the first five or six pages which serve as an overview of the project, particularly the section indicated "5.2 Engine Design Goals". For instance, the design of the game is to place the weight upon the GPU rather than the CPU, meaning graphics cards influence performance in StarCraft II more than central processors and as such, the graphics card is where you should be dishing out money upon for better results.

It is also stated that we'll be seeing increased uses of dynamic lighting effects over Blizzard's last RTS Warcraft 3, and may emerge as part of a High Dynamic Range feature ingame for people with more modern graphics cards.

There is also a few screenshots of the game throughout and in between the diagrams that may be of interest. I have added them to this mini-chronicle. As you can see, they form the piece of the story we were never shown at BlizzCon 2007, when Raynor goes down to the cafeteria, drinks, and Tychus Findlay comes to talk to him for some reason.




Blizzard and AMD

Something also of interest is Blizzard's choice to release this level of in-depth information at what is primarily an AMD event. It appears there has been a large amount of collusion between AMD and Blizzard that is only just coming to light in the last few weeks; we've previously reported on Blizzard and AMD Join Hands last week.

It is highly unusual for Blizzard to release such technical papers, one must wonder what sort of deal Blizzard and AMD have between them, certainly AMD is getting plenty of exclusive coverage and directly from the developers themselves. That is powerful publicity, and as E3 has shown us having developers on your side is beneficial in terms of what kind of coverage you receive in turn and what the public view of the company is.

In turn, it is known that Blizzard are receiving the latest and most advanced hardware that AMD's graphics division can turn out, not only providing for their development teams but for their big events like the test machines at BlizzCon. All of these graphics cards, thousands, are probably provided at a huge discount or potentially free under their agreement; after all the production price of a graphics card is barely anything in the retail price, the billions spent in developing that generation of graphics cards in Research and Development is the main cost for companies like Nvidia and AMD today and that needs to be recuperated in the retailing.



Source

The technical paper itself seems lost, unfortunately. The overall work was entitled Advances in Real‐Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games Course, quite a mouthful, Blizzard did not write the whole work, just Chapter Five. The editor of the combined collection is Natalya Tatarchuk (first bio on this page), a graphics software architect that has had a long and reputable standing with ATI through SIGGRAPH events in her official capacity across this last decade. A worthy read, even if 99% of fans won't be able to make much of the bulk of the contents.


As ever, other articles I have wrote can be navigated through the Kalos' Chronicles. New chapters will be available on StarCraftWire.net in the near future. In the meanwhile, do read:

• One, Two, Four: StarCraft II and Multicore
• Wreaking Havok with Starcraft II
• StarCraft 2 System Requirements

See you soon!



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