Both 5870 and 480 unable to handle Starcraft II official campaign at 30 fps

[sniper_sung]

First of all, if you have a properly performing system with a decent GPU, this mission should not be an issue at all. Yes, it is simply the most intense and unit heavy 30-50 minutes of the single player campaign (anyone beat this on Normal and able to unlock the +250 kill achievement?) but the only way to really bog down a system with it is to build more than a dozen and a half carriers or more.

The issue is these 18++ carriers will likely lead you to loose the mission on anything but the easiest mode due to their build times and resource-sucking costs. No only that but they are quite weak against the hybrid enemies faced in the mission. Yes, the main point of the mission is to die (no, really) but I have found it extremely hard to get the 1500 kills using a carrier-centric force; even on Normal.

Here is the thing: what we are seeing is a completely unrealistic test conducted in what seems to be sub-par conditions. Within the game itself and even in multiplayer, there is no way a player would be able to build up the unit quantites seen in that mission. It also seems like the cards in question may be throttling due to the game's heat bug. Nonetheless, the mission really does display a worst case scenario for Starcraft 2 which makes it perfect for GPU benching.

I tried last night to recreate the framerates the original article talks about but I just can't. With 16 carriers my HD 5870 + i5 were still working at 40-60 FPS.

It looks like you didn't get the point.

a) You'll need a mothership to cloak the carriers;
b) You'll need a computer more powerful than 5870/480 to play special maps like 1v7 in Starcraft 1.

@sniper_sung: What is your point?
Everybody who ever played RTS has experienced slowdowns when larger groups of enemies fight - so nothing special here.
Is "lower than 20 fps" too slow? Then watch these graphs (scroll down the german text). It shows the cpu scaling of SC2 with a GTX480 graphics card (@1024x768 resolution without AA/AF to minimize gpu impact). There are a lot of sub 20 fps grey "minimum fps" bars - so nothing special here, either.
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/aid,76...giespiel/Test/

Edit: A video of the test scene is shown, too.

The reviewer isn't a gamer...

If you guys can't do at least 60 APM in Starcraft 2 then you probably don't qualify saying that 30 fps is enough for an RTS game. I have to say that the cloaking is an effective strategy to force the opponent with a poor graphics card to disconnect the game. Did you guys ever play any special RPG maps in Warcraft 3 before? I guess no.