Anyone playing StarCraft 2? And is it playable?

I bought a $2500 laptop so I could play all my latest greatest with ease. And that it does Crysis 2, SSFIV Arcade Ed, Black Ops etc. All on highest settings with very playable fps..

Why StarCraft 2 is the only unplayable game baffles my mind. This game's graphics should be a walk in the park compared to Crysis 2 yet the frames drop every 60 seconds from 45-50 down to 5-6fps then jump back up again. Yes I have the game on the highest settings, latest drivers installed etc etc. I can set the game to lowest settings and it will do the same thing, of course at peak the fps are much higher. It doesn't matter if I have 10 units or 60 units on screen.

Anyway I guess I felt a little better learning this was a widespread issue. I searched the forums on a dozen sites reading about others with the same problem. I actually tried to follow many of the so called "fixes" for this but found that the 7 or 8 methods I tried all made no difference. I went on my desktop PC, also a quad core with 2 with 2 GTX 470's in SLI and laughed when I had the same issue there. Wondering if it's related to having 4 cores? Anyway in my opinion this was caused by a recent game patch as I never had this issue in the beginning. So I feel the only true fix will have to come from Blizzard in an upcoming game patch.

I'm sure there's tons of you playing this game but I have to know if everyone is having this on the new m17x R3's or just some of us. I guess because we're all likely to have similar hardware setups so it's makes sense if all or almost of us have the same problem. Btw, I have the R3, stock CPU, 8Gb ram, GTX 580M, 750HDD. If any of you have or had this issue and actually fixed it permanently please tell me how

Thanks!

 

I play this game all the time. Here's the fps I get but I have the 6990m:

M17x r3 6990m Starcraft 2 - YouTube

The graphics is set to "extreme." I read somewhere that Sc2 plays better with 6990m compared to 580m.

 

I can play on 30 fps on extreme with my crap 460m w/ msi afterburner.

Goes down to 20-25 when I see like 100 banelings though D:

 

it it a 580 throttling issue that I have read about??

I play it on Extreme on my Elitebook 8740W quad core first gen i Series CPU and Firepro m7820 ( 5870 ) I have never checked but I dont think I have ever dropped under 30FPS even with hundreds of units

 

Wow.. well this is slightly depressing. I've been convinced it's hardware related but clearly if others on the similar hardware aren't experiencing it then there's other issues. But I know there's still a sh*tload of others in general with this problem and it's not something as simply resolved by adding more ram, or switching the videocard. I've read of people wasting their cash trying to resolve it by doing these things and just ended up returning them because it didn't make a difference. I've had the R3 about a week. Installed all my games, a few misc programs.. But anyway like I said it's like I have a weak set up. I benchmarked SSFIV Arcade Ed on max settings even with additional performance enhancements in the Nvidia control panel and it benched at 58-63 fps at 1920x1080. I have Crysis 2 v1.9 running on max settings with the dx11 patch and I'm getting about 30 fps..

Well I guess I have to accept that the first game I legitimatly bought in 6 yrs coincidently will be the only one I will never be able to enjoy..

 

Hmm.. but if it were a throttling issue would it not affect other games too and not just SC2??

 

Very true, have you ever monitored the CPU usage and GPU temps in your system?

I checked my husbands M17X with the 6990 and his unit gets 68-118fps on extreme settings but I didnt play too long, just loaded a save game and got myself killed. is it an issue with Nvidia drivers or settings possibly? I am at a loss for you sorry OP

 

I appreciate the help anyway but I've checked for any spikes in the cpu and it lingers very low and idles around 3-6%. I didn't bother checking gpu temps only because I can't see how it could be overheating only to one game. So it just sounds unrelated. As for drivers I've installed 280.26 and 280.19. Same thing.

I tried so many different things.. Tweaked the ingame graphics settings all the way to low everything. No change. Tweaked the gpu settings in the Nvidia control panel to lowest just for that game. No changes. Disabled SpeedStep in the BIOS, no change.. Closed background tasks.. no change. Just doesn't make sense why only this one game is giving me a headache..

 

Are any components overclocked? If so, un-overclock them

 

My old macbook pro used to do this...

Remember to always check that your computer's partners are clean before networking with them. Because those macs sleep around...

 

im seeing one commonality, most of us have the 6990 and are not having an issue. I suspect a problem with the Nvidia Driver since the OP has the 580

 

Agreed, I usually start at around 90 fps during the early game, and drop to about 60-70 fps during macro battles with hundreds of units on display.

 

This is one of the reasons (aside from the fact that it is a lot cheaper) why I opted for 6990m... Sc2 just plays better on this card. no issues at all

 

I'd almost agree with you that the issue could be Nvidia except I have 3 friends with Nvidia gpu's and have no issues. Also found a few online with my issue that have AMD cards.. So appears to be unrelated. I'll get to the bottom of this... eventually

 

Same here, max settings in Full HD, no issues and very smooth. Never seen a lag.

 

Are you guys here all in masters league?

 

Plays great at 2560x1440 on Ultra. I don't monitor frame rates, I just play and if it looks good and things happen when I click I'm happy.

Cheers,

 

What GPU temps are you guys getting while playing SC2? Is 89C dangerously high?

 

Starcraft 2 ran at 60 fps on all settings except for ultra on the 460m where it ran at 40-50 fps. Definitely playable but the decrease in frames is noticeable. I'm waiting for my new laptop with the 580 to arrive. Even though the 460 was capable of playing sc2 on high settings at 60fps I still played with low graphics.


Note: I'm in masters league on multiple accounts and races, been on a losing streak with protoss though cause of all the 1 base cheese going on.

 

I'll be curious to the performance on your GTX 580M as well... since everyone posting here has AMD cards so I can't really compare.

I did manage to get it running smoothly again on my desktop with GTX 470's in SLI. For a while I was beginning to convince myself it's clearly an Nvidia problem but that's not the case on my desktop.

Wondering if it's a bad driver on the R3..

 

Even a 6970M can max out Starcraft II. The problem is that the game only utilizes two CPU cores, and easily gets CPU blocked. Try lowering the settings (like physics effects) that rely on the CPU and you will likely see better performance.

 

sounds like throttling. identical symptoms.

 

Like PhysX?

 

I don't think SC2 uses PhysX, but in the graphics settings for Starcraft II there are two settings that are CPU dependent. One of them is the physics settings, for how realistic stuff like explosions will be, and one of them is... I don't remember off hand. But if you lower those, you will probably help boost your FPS.

Here's a site that did some benchmarking at the release of SC2 that shows the difference with CPUs. Unfortunately, SC2 is just as CPU bottle necked today as back then.

I really wish Blizzard would optimize the game for multi-cores, but it doesn't sound likely. That would really give our laptops a boost in SC2 though.

 

Thanks for that, I'll check it out

 

I can play ultra at 50-60fps with the 460m. Only dips down to like 20 when there's like 30 carriers on screen lol

 

I always turned down shadows for a quick boost in performance on my old 8800gts. I'm not sure of the memory bus on the 580M but if it is 192bit or lower you'll probably see a benefit.

If it is 256bit or higher I wouldn't worry about it, but maybe try it anyway

 

its 256

 

Hi,

Im having the EXACT same problem with my newly purchased, M17x 6990.
All other games work fine, but SC2 is literally unplayable due to the FPS drops.
Have you been able to solve the problem yet? Im at my wit`s end.
I have installed the latest drivers, and checked my temps and made sure that Im running on the highest performance.

Please help!