Starcraft II

Developer: Blizzard Entertainment

From our StarCraft 2 review:
‘The game play may be a decade old but it’s been balanced and tuned to a razor sharp point before being wrapped in an engrossing storyline and excellent campaign mode. The game is chock full of quality missions and set pieces and while there are some ideas that fall a bit flat, the highlights shine through like a high power laser through wet toilet paper.’




For a full performance analysis of the above graphs, see page 8. We tested Starcraft II to find out what was actually playable and found that we had to turn down everything to the absolute lowest settings to achieve anything near this, and even then the average frame rate was 20fps with notable dips and stutters. At the lowest settings, the game frankly doesn't look great either, as you can see.

Best Playable Settings

Following on from our previous look at the VIA Nano Dual-Core, where we covered the best playable settings for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Team Fortress 2, we decided to put the AMD E-350 through the same process.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Best Playable Settings:

• Resolution: 1,280 x 720
  
• Graphics Detail: High
  
• Detail Level: All enabled apart from soften smoke edges
  
• Anti-aliasing: None

At the settings above, the frame rate counter would consistently average high 20s to low 30s during game play. However, enabling the Extra detail level caused this to drop to a pretty consistent 20fps. Turning on the soften smoke edges feature at any time would cause a drop to 10-15fps whenever there was an explosion, so this needed to be disabled. Higher resolutions were also too much for the Radeon HD 6310 GPU too.

Team Fortress 2

Best Playable Settings:

• Resolution: 1,280 x 720 (1,680 x 1,050)
  
• Graphics Detail: High
  
• Anisotropic Filtering: 8x
  
• Anti-aliasing: None
  
• Reflections: World
  
• Multicore Rendering: Enabled

We found that we could bump up Team Fortress 2's detail settings above that of the VIA Nano-Dual core (with Chrome 520 graphics IGP) to include 8x anisotropic filtering and world reflections, and it still remained fast and playable in multiplayer mode. Increasing the resolution to 1,680 x 1,050 at the same settings also resulted in a generally playable frame rate, with the occasional stutter to 10-15fps. You could get away with this, depending on the map.