M17x - Starcraft 2 Discussion

Try to run the replay in extreme settings and not in medium and see if you get 750 and 900 mhz in the sensors. If not, then maybe you are not maximizing the performance of your gpu. Check your power options and make sure that when you are plugged in the gpu is set to "maximize performance." Like mine here:



Have you tried the latest Dell Driver for our GPU? Same problem?

If the problem still persists after trying every fix you can think of... then you probably need to call DELL and ask for a replacement. Good luck!

 

Yes, I have the latest Dell Driver for our GPU, and I think I have tried every fix I think of....
Im thinking about contacting Blizzard first before Dell, because everything else works perfectly so I think the problem is with the game and compatibility and not my Alienware.
Speaking of which, I am very pleased with our machine despite the annoying SC2 performance....

 

Try doing hardware test. Lets see if everything is ok

 

Well since you've tried everything else have u uninstalled and reinstalled sc2?

If it only acts this way in that one game its all I can think to do. If you haven't tried that perhaps it's worth a shot.

Cheers,

 

Thanks, I just did a fresh install of SC2 and still the same problem.

But I realized something else.

When I first booted up my Alienware for the first time 3 days ago, I got this message:

"The AC power adapter wattage and type cannot be determined.
The battery may not charge.
The system will adjust the performance to match the power available.

Please connect a Dell 65W AC adapter or greater for best system performance.

To resolve this issue, try to reseat the power adapter

Strike the F3 key (before the F1 or F2 key) if you do not want to see power warning messages again.

Strike the F1 key to continue, F2 to run the setup utility. Press F5 to un onboard diagnostics."

I unplugged my battery and let it drain down to 94% and i plugged it back in, and it wont charge!
It just sits at 94% and it wont charge.

This MUST have something to do with it but I really need help here....

 

Take the battery off and run on ac. Play sc2 and check if the issue still persists.

 

I booted up SC2 with the battery out, but no difference in frame rate. Maybe slightly worse in fact.
Im on the phone with Dell Technical Support right now, Ill update when I find out the problem. It seems like there have been alot of Alienware owners complaining about this AC Adapter message, so at least I know its not just me. If anyone has similar experiences please let me know

 

Well.. This is really weird.. Good luck!

 

Ok a Dell technician is coming to my house to (hopefully) resolve the problem tomorrow. After an hour on the phone, the Dell rep said that since the battery wasnt being recognized as charging the overall performance was being lowered. Could be either a motherboard or a faulty adapter problem.

Ill update again tomorrow.

This really puts a damper on the excitement I felt when I got the new M17x....

 

Hopefully it's not the mobo. That would be terrible.

 

The Dell technician just came over and changed out my motherboard.

Apparently the problem was a faulty connection between the battery and motherboard, and it was replaced.
This was causing the computer to not run at max performance.
The weird thing is I was getting 30 FPS on Ultra on the Witcher 2..

Anyways, SC2 now runs at a smooth 60 FPS on Extreme settings!

Thank you so much to all of you who helped especially qohelet.
If any of you want to add me in SC2 just PM me!
Im a diamond/masters team league player (1v1 is Platinum though) lol

I learned so much about my Alienware in this process and Ill try to help out anyone else on this forum who is having similar issues!

 

Am happy you got evrything fix enjoy playing sc2. Add me up on sc2. Ill pm you. Am in diamond in 1v1.

 

When I start the game up everything is smooth on my M17xR2. Placing structures and running around the map is smooth as well. I have reduce mouse lag and vsync enabled. I'm at a solid 60 fps until I get a decent sized army (maybe 100+ supply in army). Once I have an army running around I drop to about 50fps and then 40fps when I have my army attacking my opponents. The same thing happens no matter what configuration of settings I use. Even with everything on low I drop to about 40 fps if my maxed army is attacking my opponents. I feel like I should be able to play the game on ultra with no slow down. Especially SC2 needs to be fluid for micro.

Any ideas?

 

Im kind of having a similar problem right now with my 285m's.

They don't really get much of an FPS boost in BF3 going from high to low, stays relatively the same. And it also suddenly drops and hiccups every once in a while.

 

I have read that Starcraft 2 is not optimized to use quad-core processors very well. That may be what is causing this... however, I find it usual that you're having framerate problems.

 

My framerate is fine until I get a lot of units attacking at once. If I'm just using zealots and stalkers I'm fine. If I put out archons and void rays it gets choppy. Guess those units are more CPU intensive.

 

What settings do you have? I can run 1200p high/ultra. Of course any game will be choppy with 1 million units spawning. Games like Nexus Wars get unplayable for me.

 

You should run a performance monitor such as MSI afterburner and see what your GPU usage is when you notice the slowdown. With dual 6990's, and I assume the latest drivers, I'd wager your slowdown is due to bottlenecking at the CPU and not video card related.

It's possible they could be downclocking due to heat buildup, but I'd say it's less likely.

 

It's not heat. It's not unplayable or anything, I just don't like going below 60 fps at any given point in a game like this. Its important for micro to stay smooth. I'm on ultra, but I get the exact same frame rates even on low. Everything is 60 and smooth until two large armies collide and it drops down to 40. I should be able to be on ultra and stay smooth 60 no matter what. Right?

 

try manually setting affinity of sc2.
also could try reducing the 920xm's turbo to intel stock in case it's power throttling.

 

How do you do both of those things? I'll check the Kill A Watt and see how much power a full out fight takes.

Again, the game plays really well, except I drop down to 40 FPS or so when fighting maxed armies. Even on LOW settings that happens. My framerate actually seems smoother on ultra most of the time than low. I'm not really sure if there's anything I can do, but I can't imagine there needs to be a ridiculous system in order to sustain 60 FPS in a 4v4 even on LOW.

I feel like my system should be able to handle anything SC2 has to throw at it on Ultra settings. For god sakes at least HIGH settings. For whatever reason though, FPS dont change based on graphics quality. At least for me anyway.

 

if i could sign up for this tournament it would be cool. platinum league.

 

Hello,

If there is any tournament I would like to be in. I play on eu/na servers but mainly team games so what ever you guys set up I would love to be in.

By the way IntenceIGFX, my starcraft does exactly what you describe as well but my specs are lower ( 2630qm, single 580m).

 

With a 200/200 army attacking a pile of rocks my power usage gets to about 210. 215-220 TOPS when my maxed army is attacking another one. I drop to about 45 when attacking a pile of rocks (voidrays / collosi / archons -- just stalkers stays @ 60) and about 30 when attacking a maxed army. Is there something I can do to make it so that I don't ever slow down against another army? I'd be fine palying on high instead of ultra, but I should be able to play SC2 with no slow down. Slow down = bad micro.

Any ideas?

EDIT: For whatever reason, in SC2 my CPU usage is only like 25% or so. Any way to get this higher? I went to set affinity and enabled all processors. Didn't do anything.

 

What happens if you turn v-sync off? Are you forcing AA or anything? You should get much higher FPS. I have a GTX 260 in my desktop, which is many years old and only gets like 2000 points in 3DMark11, and I don't drop below 30 FPS in real games, even 4X4 (custom games can kill me though, especially those that break the zoom out thing so you can go all the way out).

 

Even with vsync off it still goes to about 40 FPS in large scale combat. I don't force AA or any of the sort.

 

Understand I am just throwing out a random suggestion here that might improve performance (it does for me).

Try disabling the page file, so everything is forced into ram and there is no HDD paging. That improved my SC2 and SWTOR performance quite a bit.

Also, trying turning down effects one at a time (as in turn them really low and see the improvement), you might be hitting a bandwidth issue when lots of effects are going off, but it might only be caused by one setting, you find that setting you can lower it a bit and still play on Ultra.

 

Between Low and Ultra, There's MAYBE a 5 FPS difference. How do I disable the page file? Is there any detriment to that?

 

Right click computer, properties, advanced system settings, performance, advanced tab, virtual memory, set it to no page file.

Technically, if you run out of memory things will crash, but I have been running no page file for years, and do it on my desktop right now that only has 6 gigs and it never runs out of memory.

 

How exactly does that work? I think the issue I'm having is the game not utilizing enough of my CPU. Even on LOW settings, a maxed army battle gets laggy. Its still "playable", but not smooth.

 

Basically, in the early days before gigs of ram your computer never had enough main memory. Thus, if you ever opened a program that would not fit into main memory it would get paged to the HDD, and then sent as needed. This was the cause of HDD thrashing, and general horrid slow performance for a lot of computers. This was why ram upgrades seemed like a whole new computer if you didn't have enough, because it would avoid so much paging.

Modern computers have so much ram you never need to page, yet Windows still does it (for whatever reason it tries to always keep main memory as empty as possible, and will page out anything that wasn't used extremely recently), and it slows everything down because your HDD is never as fast as main memory. You turn off paging and performance increases quite a lot, at least in my experience. A common example is the Orgrimmar lag of WoW, this was often caused by paging. I had friends that were getting like sub 10 FPS in the capital city, we turn off paging and they are getting 35 FPS. Basically, anytime you have a lot of assets come on screen that were off screen and suddenly get lag it could be a paging issue.

You can force CPU usage by doing Ctrl-Alt-Del, opening the task manager, finding the SC2 process, and setting it to a higher priority. If you want it to max your CPU set it to real-time, might crash your computer though. It will reset after a crash, so no real risk in trying it.

 

Paging didn't help. Also, setting the priority in the task manager didn't help either. My cpu usage is still really low while playing. Let me ask you to run an experiment:

Make a game against an AI. Play as protoss and they can be whatever. Set them to hard. At the start of the game , type the following cheats:

Moredotsmoredots
catfoodforprawnguns
bunker55aliveinside
sosayweall
hanshotfirst
tooktheredpill

After that, build up a 200/200 army consisting of Stalkers, Zealots, Sentries, Void Rays, Collosi (no more than 6) and Archons. Walk around with just those units not near a base and tell me what kind of FPS you get. Then, what happens when all the units are attacking a pile of rocks, and finally then what happens when you attack a full blown enemy. Also, what is your framerate when the game first starts? What are your system specs? Ingame config? reduce mouse lag? vsync? Kittens? Thanks

 

A better test would be for you to upload a replay here and I can use it. Just open one of your recent games where you had the issue, watch the replay (make sure to have it on first person camera or whatever, where it follows your in-game perspective) and copy down a few times in the replay and the FPS you get. I can replay it on my computer and at the exact same spots see what kind of FPS I am getting, then we can compare.

 

Graphics wise the game plays just fine. The problem I'm noticing now is that small freeze when a unit pops out or a structure finishes. It happens a decent amount in the game and is really annoying. I've been having BSOD's that may be related to my ram being bad. I'm running memtest right now so hopefully it'll turn something up and I can fix it. If my ram is faulty, would that attribute to the frequent mico freezes? I just played against the AI on my Vaio Z 1 on all low settings and never once did my game get that freeze. Is that because I'm running a SSD? I have a brand new OCZ Vertex 2 128 gig SSD in the box. I bought it a while ago with the intention of sticking it in my m17xR2 but then I read that SSD performance was having issues on the machine. Not sure what those issues are or if they ever got resolved, but I remember people complaining about transfer speeds bogging down or something along those lines. I've tried doing that file paging virtual memory thing to see if that helps with the micro freezes but it really didn't. Any idea what is is or how to fix it? If my ram is bad, would that be a contributing factor to it?

 

Hi, I've noticed my R2 is not that good to play Starcraft 2, FPS dropped heaps when I play 4v4, which from 40=> 12(@ highest settings), is that normal? Hard to macro when everyone fight together. I think I installed 11.12 driver. Any tips to improve it?

 

I only play custom @ 1200p high settings, no stutters for me. I'm on 12.2 beta drivers though.

 

Hi can some one please help

I am currently running starcraft 2 on a alienware m17x r2 system and i can not get my frame rate up during play at the moment max 15 on ultra and even 15 on low graphic's i get a frame rate of 30 on the main screen and video's i have tried everything so far to no success my system should be fine to play

 

Anyone here play CoH 2?

Starcraft is fun, but really starting to enjoy CoH more.