Kalos' Chronicles >> StarCraft II Specs Emerge



StarCraft II Specs Emerge

Greetings guys and girls, I'm writing this Kalos Chronicle up quick and short, rather than the longer formats I usually prefer to write these things in, as this is petty recent news and no doubt you'll be interested to hear it without me spending a week or more in writing and editing this work.

Leord tapped me a week or so ago with some good information which had surfaced from SC Legacy after the confirmation that there IS a StarCraft II Beta Release Date and I was quite interested in what I read.


Information leak

In the gameplay findings of SC Legacy's member FoxSpirit, it became clear what had been let slip at the recent Electronic Sports League (usually shortened to ESL) Finals event in Vienna (For those curious, the ESL is a large international gaming organisation, basically a fairly huge eSports company, that holds many tournaments and challenges across a variety of games such as the numerous series of FIFA sports games, Counter Strike: Source, and another Blizzard game, Warcraft III).

Blizzard was displaying the upcoming StarCraft II to people attending at one of the ESL events, and letting the public play around with the game for limited periods of time (much like at BlizzCon). Useful from a technological point of view is the machine they were using to run the game was significantly easy to identify, having a very recognisable chassis and prominent labelling.

Previously, Xordiah was more that a little tight-lipped and reluctant to respond to questions regarding the technical information of the PCs used to demo StarCraft II at previous events (such as Blizzcon 2007/2008 and WWI 2008), and although we had identified some models and components from big name OEMs, we were unable to reveal specific system specs without approval. Thankfully that problem is moot in this case, as this particular leak does not originate from us and the cat is already out of the proverbial bag - we can speak of it freely!


The Hardware

The Asus G71V

The exact machine that was being used to run the current build of StarCraft II (which should be fairly similar to the upcoming beta's build if it is as close as everyone here at StarcraftWire thinks it to be), was the Asus Republic of Gamers G71V. A quite high end laptop, designed for prestige and with attention to aesthetics. This device has the high price tag of $1200 or more in most places, and the system specifications make for no lightweight either: considering that this is a laptop, it packs a huge punch.

System Specifcations of the Asus G71V:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Extreme QX9300, 2.53 Ghz
• Memory: 4 GB of DDR3 RAM
• Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce 9700M GT
• Hard Disk Space: 2x 512 GB

Something to note in terms of a discrepancy you may notice between the other fansite sources and my own writeup of the specifications of the laptop is with the RAM. There appears to be an error in the specifications of the G71V provided by the original SC Legacy source, in that they listed the laptop to be equipped with DDR2 ram. However: Asus, the manufacturer, only list it as being compatible with DDR3 on their own site, and similarly many of the retailers also fail to list any version using DDR2. I can only assume this is a fault with the original report that wasn't noticed or checked properly.

No doubt there will be those who would be interested as to where this measures up to our recommended guidelines for hardware published over half a year ago (has time gone that fast?). My old predictions are as follows:

StarCraftWire.net Recommended Specs:

• CPU: Athlon X2 / Core 2 Duo
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics Card: Geforce 8600 GT
• Hard Disk Space: 7 GB

Obviously from taking a quick look over these, it is clear that the Asus G71V well exceeds the recommendations; and since it comes from a demonstration bench, it runs StarCraft II well. However, it is important to note that the choice of laptop is not very typical or mainstream, it is in fact fairly exclusive and unique. The Asus G71V is the first gaming laptop to feature the new and extremely high end QX9300 processor that Intel only recently in the last two months made available.


Evaluation

The gaming laptop is a prestige item, used most likely because of its sheer power to impress and modern technology, it's likely also heavily subsidised in price for Blizzard to rent, and is going to be far from typical machines that'll play the game well after release. After all, this show was a huge publicity boost for the G71V and Asus in addition to the publicity for StarCraft II and Blizzard.

It is very unlikely that StarCraft II actually takes effective use of many of the features this laptop has to offer, such as the twin hard drives. As I mentioned in Wreaking Havok with Starcraft II; StarCraft II is not a game hyped to take advantage of the power of a multicore processor, and is unlikely to do so, making a quad core processor an added luxury for this game even on the higher end of the game.

Similar statements can be made of Geforce 9700M and DirectX 10 feature uses; nearly all graphics cards produced today are able to use DirectX 10, and even 10.1 in some cases, but the likelihood of StarCraft II to have DirectX 10 exclusive features is low, and would mainly be there for those who choose their games by features rather than gameplay. DirectX 10 has a nice ring to it and gets boxes off retail shelves, and other companies have used this fact even when almost no content has been redone in DirectX10 at all. This was discussed in the article Starcraft II, Shaders and DirectX 10.

In conclusion, while many people will be excited and point to this discovery as hard evidence of what actually runs StarCraft II, it is important to remember that the use of this particular laptop was done with a large element of Public Relations theatrics, and the choice of PC is probably not what most of the Blizzard team have themselves (unless Mike Morhaime is more generous on his IT budgeting than we could ever dream of). In wither way, it's good to get down to actual models and components which are 100% verified to work with StarCraft, to give us some sort of frames as to what we can expect when the beta starts.


If you liked this episode of Kalos' Chronicles, you can find all his previous columns here, and if you keep an eye out there, you'll also find any future technological updates.


Apologies for the delay in this article. Recent site chaos, including a completely different system for which the articles now are published with, has resulted in this article being delayed for quite some time. We got there in the end, and the new system appears to be working properly now, and no doubt this will prove to be faster and easier in the long run once all the publishing authors are up to scratch on the differences and revisions created by the change in software and website coding.

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