Starcraft II on M11x - General Discussion

how do get the drivers you have?

 

258.96: most ppl have this driver and it works great with most games (including SC2)

259.22: Also works great with most games ( i tried it with Mafia 2, SC2, Borderlands and Just Cause 2) but some are having trouble running source games like TF2.

 

thanx for your help

 

so all i do is download the driver and it should work fine?

 

The 258.96 requires a little more work to download, instructions here

The 259.22 is pretty straight forward "I have pack the entire drivers along with the modded inf. Just extract to a folder and run the setup. Remember to driver sweep if necessary."

 

Just played 5-6 games straight and wanted to comment definitely playable and plays very well! fps 40ish but mainly around 30 with lowest dip to 20 or so even in 3v3 and 4v4 no noticeable lag or slow downs never had waiting for player unless i was minimizing. All my settings are on Ultra except for texture on high, reflections off and shadow on medium. using 258.96 beta drivers. i7 with 156OC and the latest bios ao3 i think? but yeah definitely playable, i was very surprised. Before i did 2v2 or 3v3 with computers but tonight i actually played with my friends online and had no problems whatsoever other than the tiny screen and cramped keyboard, but i hooked it up to my external monitor and got the same results.

 

Can anyone provide their optimal in-game settings & CPU speed with their i7 R2?

 

I have an M11x R2 Core i5 (1.066Ghz, 1.866Ghz max). I actually have set all of my settings to low. The game looks "good enough" on low. It looks great, actually.

In the middle of a heated 1v1 or 2v2 battle, the framerates can drop once the game goes into macro combat with all of the units on the screen. I'd much rather have smooth framerates in those situations, instead of having some eye candy that I won't even notice when I'm focused on the action.

 

I got my m11x r2 yesterday and Starcraft 2 was the first game I installed. Out of the box, it was running < 30 fps on low settings. I installed the latest 335M drivers from Dell and the game is running > 30 fps on all high settings. Hope this helps some others.

 

i run 257.30 dell drivers and SC2 plays smooth as butter. 20 fps min with maxed out units and heavy fighting. Otherwise constant 32fps to 50fps. All details on high also.

side note: Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space runs smooth and crisp with these drivers for me. NO problems what so ever.

 

a side note i also want to highlight that the driver break games like Just Cause 2 and Fallout

 

i run SC2 with all medium settings and textures set to ultra... no lag even with big battles. once you update the graphics card it works dreams! the stock drivers made the game run on all low. UPDATE IS HIGHLY recommended!!

M11x R2

 

Actually for some reason when you put textures to ultra and play the campaign lava level (I think it called Devil's something.. I forgot), but for some reason, you'll get some mouse/scrolling lag. Right now, the only way I can figure out to remedy it is to put textures to low instead of check boxing the "reduce mouse lag" since it also reduces performance, and we don't want that do we. ;-)

I am still wondering if anyone is experiencing an increase in fps with updated Nvidia drivers compared to the Dell drivers.

 

I saw a huge increase in fps after upgrading my drivers. It was night vs day. Multiplayer would lag pretty bad, but now everything is buttery smooth.

 

which drivers did you use?

 

what drivers are you using?

 

What drivers are you using?
Just joking
More than likely he is using the 257.30, 258.96 modified, or the 259.xx modified.

 

Any hard fps numbers to go with that claim? I'm using Dell drivers, and OCing it to 160, I get good numbers, 45-60fps beginning, 30-45fps mid-game, and 20-30fps late game huge battles against insane AI. fps is better when playing human opponents.

 

I'm sorry but I don't have any numbers at the moment, just anecdotes.

I know that before I updated the drivers it was struggling to keep up vs a single AI, but I played an 8-player free-for-all vs 7 AI and it kept up for the most part.


I'll see if I can't get some numbers when I get back from work.

 

I've been doing a lot of testing and have come to the conclusion that SC2 is highly CPU bound. Nothing produced as much of an impact on my framerates as oc'ing to 166MHz bus speed. In addition, in heavy battles, oc'ing the GPU has little to no effect. The benefit of the GPU overclock is only really visible very early in the game viewing a simple area. Also, another telling point is that raising the graphics settings has very little effect on the FPS. Again, this points to CPU bound.

Unfortunately the CPU in the m11x has a very low potential top speed so it doesn't really stack up well vs slightly bigger laptops with much more powerful processors. What we really need in this machine is a high speed dual core mobile processor if we want SC2 to run well. The GT335M is actually probably more than up to the task of running on this small of a screen.

Either the game or the drivers need CPU optimizations ... I suppose the good news is that if Blizzard decides to optimize on that front we have a lot of potential left to unlock in this lappy ...

 

I suspect that the CPU-bound factors are mostly going to be in "Physics" and "Effects".

Starcraft 2 uses Intel's Havok physics engine, which hits the CPU pretty hard. I bet if you turn those two settings down low, you'll get a nice bump in framerate performance... especially in big battles where there are mech parts and debris and blood flying all over the place.

 

I have an R1 and it runs great on medium

 

sc runs fine on my r2

 

Dunno whether it's Battlenet problem or mine.
When I play any mode like campaign or VS AI or VS human, i start with a real smooth FPS like 30~60. However, there will be a random period that the game will have serious drop on FPS till like 5~15 for about 5 seconds (Mb 2 or 3 times per game). After that turn normal again.

 

Is it down clocking from heating issues?

 

Not sure but i do insert the temporary fix given by Blizzard for the Graphic card overheating issues that cap frame rate @ 30 FPS on main menu though ..

 

I'd like to throw my two cents in here. I have an M11xR2 (i7, 4GB RAM, 250GB 7200rpm HD). For a while, it was playing okay, but not great - 1v1 on High, fps would start in the 30s and drop to the teens by the end of the game; 2v2 on Low (but Models on High) required a cooling pad to be really playable, otherwise fps started around 25 and dipped to like 10. For the record, I do know that the NVidia GPU was on and not the integrated one; I had the small program from NVidia that tells you whether the GPU is on or off.

I installed the modified 258.96 drivers as I saw on this thread. I also applied the fix provided here as first reported on page 23 of this thread. The framerate has quite improved - now, in 1v1 High (with Ultra textures) it starts out around 45-50fps and rarely drops below 20, usually hanging out around 25. In 2v2 High (with Ultra textures) it starts out around 35-40 and hangs around 20-25; worst drop was to 16 during a big battle. (I don't know which change did the trick; bad science on my part!)

One thing I noticed after these two changes was that the M11x's fan kicked on HARD in game, for the first time. Before these changes, the fan was always off or fairly quiet, and would run for a long time after I turned off the game, and I never understood why some people complained about the fan being so loud. Now, the fan is loud, and shortly after I've exited the game, it goes back off, its job complete. (I'm totally okay with this - I play with earphones in most of the time anyway.) I'm willing to bet that the improved fan performance has directly improved my framerate.

I wonder if the modified 258.96 drivers could have fixed an issue with the fan not coming on loud? Has anyone else noticed anything like this?

 

I apologize for not reading all the way through this thread before posting my own experience. If I'm understanding right, it seems like most performance problems are stemming from a CPU bottleneck, because the M11x's CPUs just don't meet the system requirements? Since SC2 just requires raw MHz, and the i7's 1.2 GHz cores don't meet the 2.4 MHz requirement? This does explain why the fps drops in the late game, even if your screen is centered on a location devoid of units.

A question - can/should the i7 be overclocked? I remember Alienware advertising the overclock-ability of the Core 2 Duo CPU and the i5, but I don't recall them mentioning anything about the i7.

 

The processors can be overclocked in the bios. I'm sure they're some guides out but just to give you a quick overview go into bios change the bus speed to the highest. Start playing starcraft II or whatever game and if your computer freezes/crash/BOSD then go back into bios and put to bus speed down one. And repeat until you find a speed that is right for you. Just a quick note that overclocking will lower battery life I'm not to sure about the exact numbers thought.

 

Overclocking has no noticeable impact on battery life.

 

I have also noticed this problem... And something tells me the text in the game are blurrier than usual because it's trying to stretch for those 6 pixels.

 

Hi all,

First off, I've read through the entire thread and found a lot of info that will hopefully help improve the performance of my i7, 4gb RAM laptop w/ SC2 whitelisted and showing as using the GPU through the icon.

Last night, I played a 1v1 game, 258.96 Drivers, Medium Setting with shaders set to low, and got an average of 20-25 FPS (which isn't very good when playing competitively on a desktop for the last month).

I then tried a 4v4 with some friends, and the performance was SO bad I had to change everything to the lowest in game and still got 5-15 FPS mid-end game, it wasn't playable at all. I had to send my units in and scroll away from the battle to get more than 5 FPS.

During this whole time, my fan did not kick on once at all. I'm using A03 Bios too. I monitored my temps and they stayed around 65C. It was to the point where I regretting purchasing this laptop.

Now reading through this thread I found quite a few things i'm going to try to improve performance:
-OC my CPU to ~1.6
-Install Physx Drivers (incase there was an issue with the 258.96 drivers automatically installing them)
-Mess with the shadows settings mentioned in the linked Battle.Net forum threads (setting shadows=0 in the variables file)

All in all:
-Is there a reason why the fan did not turn on at all (or go "loud") while playing?

-Is there anything else I can try to improve performance?

-I noticed mouse lag after I hooked up my 22' monitor (1600x1000 i forget the actual numbers for the resolution) using a HDMI-DVI adaptor, is this just due to the lag overall while playing SC2 or is it because of the adaptor?

 

Ok, this bugging the HELL out of me. I just installed the mandatory 1.1 patch and now my frame rate has dropped substantially. Before the patch, I would be getting 40-50fps and would drop to 20-30 mid to end game. Now after the patch, my games start out at 20fps MAX, average is around 15. On top of that, it freezes up a lot. Also, homescreens load incredibly slow.
Last thing I did on my m11x last night was play sc2 and it ran fine. First thing I did with it today was play sc2 after the 1.1 patch. I made NO changes to my computer or installed anything at all. I also double checked to make sure it was still on the nvidia white list.
Is anyone else experiencing this?? At this point, it is unplayable to me.

 

This is very interesting... I read so much about the performance issues in SC2 with the M11x R2 but I don't have any problems at all. Even though I have the settings set quite low I never dip under 35 fps.

The only time when there's a performance issues is when AI is involved. Pure multiplayer Bnet play does not decrease performance whatsoever. I've played loads of 3v3 and in the start of the game I have a solid 60 fps and unless the battles gets HUGE in late game I never dip under 35-40.

 

Update from my end - I'm now getting very good performance in SC2, to the point where it is very smooth and can't tell the difference from my desktop. SC2 settings aren't the highest for sure, I tweaked a lot of them, but they mostly sit at Medium, running at 60 FPS early game, and 35-45 FPS mid-late game.

Updates I have in place:
-OC'd my CPU to 1.60
-Turned on Turboboost (though I don't see it kicking in through CPU-Z)
-Updated drivers from 258 --> 260.63

I hope this helps!

 

Had you previously turned off turbo boost? It's always on by default.

 

I was told that it isnt a good idea to have turbo boost if you're overclocking. Is there any particular reason for or against that?

 

For some reason it was actually Off by default. I bought the unit from Dell Outlet as a certified refurbished, so maybe it wasn't reset? Either way, I know it was disabled when I went through the BIOS to overclock.


Also - is it a bad idea to have turboboost on while OCing? It hadn't kicked in anyways since I'm assuming the temps were outside of the threshold

 

I dont get it...How are people running this game at such low framerates? Granted I havent read the entire 50 pages, I have an R1 with 4gb of ram, Overclocked CPU and I run every setting on High with textures on ULTRA and I get great frames throughout the entire Singleplayer campaign. How come I see people with settings on low and medium? Are you using native resolutions? or are you exporting it to an external monitor (1080p?)

 

I'm exporting to an external monitor via an HDMI -> DVI output to 1680x1050 resolution - does this play a part as well?

 

See now that makes more sense...Yes teh higher the resolution you play, the more you will have to turn down the effects. I play on my laptop so I keep it at the native res of 1366x768, if I output it to my 1900x1080 screen I will def have to turn down settings.

 

please define "great"

 

Just patched and performance seems the same, if not better (certainly not worse). 1366x768 resolution added too

 

huge performance increase for me in SC2 with patch 1.1

 

How so? Using Dell drivers R2i7 OC160, i don't see a difference... :-|

 

Runs like a "dream" on mine, no lockups or any problems

 

hi, is it just me or my the screen looks extremely dark/dim on starcraft 2. can hardly see the terrain where is not explored. try to increase the gamma but then it looks artificially bright

 

For me, anything better than a MV-40 Athlon Neo + HD3410 (fancy HD3200). ...now I am just being annoying

That is called "fog of war."

Basically, if you haven't explored that area, yet, it will be "foggy." Once you have explored it, the fog of war will be somewhat lifted. A small radii around every unit and building is something called "Line of Sight," which simutaniously lifts the fog of war, and provides vision (can see what is happening) of that area to the player. The tutorials should provide some more info on this (in the single player meny, there should be the tutorials).

Happy playing !

 

I define great improvement as in, I can play Sc2 on my m11xR2 on everything on ultra 1vs1, 2vs2, and 3vs3 with very little lag on 3vs3 and no lag on 1vs1 or 2vs2. I need to turn it down a bit on 4vs4 to High

 

What is the fastest performing driver version (beta or non-beta) for SC2 today and where can I find it? Thanks in advance.