Running Starcraft 2 Below the Minimum System Specifications

Starcraft 2 is a stellar game but requires a fairly decent computer to play it on. Settings need to be turned up for an optimal gaming graphics experience. Not everyone is fortunate to have a top of the line gaming PC or laptop, as is my case. I have a self-built, older PC that falls below the minimum system requirements for Starcraft 2, yet I am still playing the game single player and multiplayer. How did I do it and what was the result? Read on!

I built my computer with the help of a friend approximately 5 years ago. I spent a fairly large sum of money on this custom machine ( a little over $1000) and still use it as my main PC. I have continually upgraded it, adding in more RAM (I'm up to 2GB, nothing compared to some of the crazy gaming laptops on the market today), with a nVidia 9600 GT video card (initially I had an nVidia 6600). I've cleaned up the system several times, doing a full-reformat and generally optmised it to run as well as an aging gaming PC can. However, my biggest detractor is my processor, an AMD running at 1.9, ok for some games but falling below the minimum specs for Starcraft 2. Yet, I'm still playing this awesome new RTS from Blizzard, but I have had to make some sacrifices to get it to work.

Upon installation, I was notified that my gaming PC fell below the minimum system requirements for Starcraft 2 and that my gaming experience would be potentially less than expected. I was some what expecting this to be the case but the built-in warning made it sound even more ominous. Still, I went ahead with the installation anyway, hoping it would still be playable.

Video quality suffered noticeably with the settings turned down, yet it certainly wasn't so horrid that I skipped the cinematics. The opening screen (login screen) has an animation of a battlecruiser orbiting a planet, slowly flying, running in the background. When I first installed the game, before adjusting the video card settings, this animation wasn't very fluid and skipped quite a bit. Turning the values down helped quite a bit.

I found 1 v 1 matches to run fairly well, even with the graphic settings turned up to medium on most of the options. I rarely lagged from framerate issues, except in the some of the most graphically-intensive battles. However, when I moved onto 3 v 3 with my friends, just fighting against the AI computer enemies, my game seriously lagged. I turned everything down to the lowest it could go, even turning the unit portraits into 2D, non-moving images. My game eventually resembled the original Starcraft, except with new units. I still lagged my friends, my framerate would annoyingly lockup and it was just barely playable. The worst was during heavy combat, with multiple armies (protoss, zerg, terran) all battling for supremacy at the same time. The shiny protoss units seemed to affect my computer the heaviest, although this might have just been my imagination.

Single player seems to be fine with very few graphical or gameplay hiccups. I've enjoyed fighting as Jim Raynor and the storyline, while not always well-written, is fun and engrossing. Controls and gameplay respond quickly to my input and the graphics for the game and the cinematics are decent enough. I'm not so worried about occasional system lag that I turn everything down for the single player, preferring instead to suffer from the occasional framerate stutter than to look at dull, flat graphics. I'm a little more hesitatnt about doing this in online mutliplayer, where ranked games actually affect my characters standings.

Basically, it is possible to play Starcraft 2 on a low-end PC that falls below the minimum system requirements for this new RTS from Blizzard. However, don't expect to be able to play in large multiplayer games without at least some lag, and realize that the in-game cinematics won't be quite as impressive as the ones you saw on TV advertisements for Starcraft 2. It is a fantastic game and definitely worth checking out (get a hold of a guest pass if you know of any friends who purchased the game) and give it a trial run. Adjust the game's graphics settings to help find the best possible performance on your own computer. Build up your APM, get a killer build order down, and stomp your foes online with Starcraft 2.