Can my Dell Latitude D830 handle Starcraft 2?

Question

I have a Dell Latitude D830 with the NVidia NVS135M chipset. I can't tell if that's higher or lower than the minimum requirements.

Here are the NVS135M specs: http://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_nvs_notebook_techspecs.html

Here are the minimum requirements for Starcraft 2: http://us.blizzard.com/support/article.xml?articleId=26242&locale=en_US

It looks to me like I might be a few generations above the minimum, but I'm not sure and don't want to shell out the cash only to find my only PC can't cut the mustard...

Asked by Dave Swersky

Answer

Just a little anecdote on workstation vs consumer gaming video cards:

I used to sysadmin at a game company, assembling new systems for the programmers and artists. The artist spec used a 3Dlabs Oxygen GVX and they cost roughly $650 each. At the time (IIRC), the "new" blockbuster consumer gaming cards were hitting the shelves, flooring the nascent blogosphere with gasps of "are you crazy? for $250! what's SLI? oh then, two please".

Anyways...

One day, one of the artist computers was hanging, and the bug was reproducible. The guy opened up Maya, used some shortcut wizard function to create a wireframe sphere, did some sub-division thing that turned the sphere into like 100,000 vertices, then used the mouse to spin/rotate the sphere. The wireframe sphere would spin around and around, swishing and spinning with the mouse movements. After a few seconds his system would freeze.

I took out his Oxygen card and put in a spare TNT2-based card. Booted up, installed the drivers, etc etc and then we repeated the bug procedure: opened up Maya, created a sphere, sub-divided it, and started spinning it. Except this time, it didn't spin. Oh wait, there it goes - the card was still doing the geometry rotation calculations. It was like those metal balls in Phantasm, except you're watching it at .5 frames per second.

Anyways...

The moral of the story is that the workstation cards tend to emphasize much more geometry calculations, which are processor intensive, whereas the consumer gaming cards emphasize frame rate in games and simulate detail by using textures. It's probably still true today as it was back then. So to put your situation into perspective, I would say yes, at 128M of memory you have the minimum that Blizzard recommends. The processing components of the video board should be well above the minimum (based on the fact that your chipset seems to be several generations ahead of the minimum recommendation of GeForce 6600, and, as a workstation product, would have more GPU strength than an equivalent consumer board of the same contemporary generation).

Do you play any other games on this system and do those games have similar minimum recommendations?

Answered by weiji

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