Starcraft II on M11x - General Discussion

Another update: I did a 2v2 and it ran beautifully: 45fps+ with the settings I mentioned earlier. I bumped it to all high and it dropped to maybe 40. It was a PUG and I'm pretty fast (75-100 APM) so I didn't really get far enough into the round to see if it would chug in the late game.

The biggest battle was 18 stalkers and 6 void rays against 12 void rays, which gave me no noticeable performance drop (I think it got down to 35).

It seems to be the comp games that really make the m11x choke, which I maintain is further evidence of the AI programming issue. I think the AI programming is really stressing out the ULV processor since overclocking gave me such a significant performance increase--I don't think it should be doing that, either, so I blame the game's programming and expect it to improve with patches optimizing it in the future.

 

strange after the last sc2 patch 1.01 can run at graphic high without issue for campaign..did blizzard do some optimization..?

 

Wow, now I remember why I suck so much at multiplayer! I think through every move like it was chess lol

 

Lol Karate, I'm the same way but im slowly getting better at MP. SP however is great and has been running perfectly with everything at HIGH and shadows at LOW.
min 37
max 61
avg 45
Running 258.96

 

hehe APM isnt everything! Im rank 10 in diamond league for 1v1 and rank 19 in diamond for 2v2 for my division and my APM averages only 55. I dont spam click!

 

I got this thing on mixed low/medium settings (r1). Still looks great, and I had no problem taking 8 carriers and a mother ship. Nothing going below 30fps.

 

I need to play SC2 on low settings because the mouse lag gets too great. I use the "reduce mouse lag" option which reduces framerate, so playing medium or high on ladder with hiccups can get annoying.

SC2 on low will normally play 60-100fps with "reduce mouse lag" option under non-battle situations, and around 40-50fps during battles in 1v1. I'm running the latest nVidia driver with the modded INF.

 

Nah, APM isn't everything--it makes you way stronger earlier more than later since you can crank out attacks faster and keep the pressure on if your initial attack doesn't kill them. Later if you can micromanage your units well while keep your macromanagement (building expansions, units, etc.) going you can do pretty well with lower APM later on

 

so all of you are playing this game no problem, right? no lockups? so guess it really is my system which makes sc2 freeze... it is rather random though...

 

OCing the gpu too much will make sc2 crash / freeze.

If that is what you are doing.

 

ah, sorry, didn't provide any additional info as i am pretty much fed up right now... now, no oc at all, neither gpu nor cpu, at least nothing that i did, system freezes during filetransfers as well (even with factory settings and windows install)... i just wanted to make sure that sc2 usually runs well and without sudden crashes.

update:
downclocked the gpu to 400 core and 960 shader + 700 memory... so far a stable afternoon... however i don't think a gpu should overheat at stock clocks

 

anyone tried running starcraft 2 at 1920x1080?? Would really like to know what kind of settings and fps I can get with my R2.

 

yes did so on my tv, however no mp, just the campaign. worked well on medium settings with no physics and lowest shadow setting. didn't check the frame counter though. no oc on either cpu or gpu.

 

I've been running it at 1080 the last 2 days. Originally had textures sent to Ultra and everything else on high except for Physics, which was on low. I turned textures down to High and kept everything else the same. I've been playing late game Campaign and it's been smooth as butter.

FYI I'm running R2 i5 OC'ed to 2.24. No OC on the video card.

 

Does the physics actually make a difference from low to off? I mean both FPS and visual?

 

I have yet to have any problems against computer AI, love this game! Oh and I also enjoy Clancy books as I assume you got your name from Ding, Clark's partner? I am just now finishing up the 1300 plus page "Executive Orders", after having put it down 12 years ago! What an amazing and exciting book, hard to believe he wrote it 14 years ago as it could easily pertain to todays geopolitical environment, don't ya think?

 

Been playing at 1080 for days now on Ultra in 2v2's pvp and campain and runs mint.

 

what does that mean? 30 fps... 60 fps... 100000 fps?

Not to be a jerk, I just don't think people are painting a very accurate picture of SC2 on m11x.

I got the R2 i7 with latest nvidia drivers and realistically you are looking at 15-45 fps in a 2v2. It gets slower as the game goes on and in any decent sized battle you will definitely be somewhere in the 20fps or lower.

This is with the recommended settings which is 1280x720 resolution, medium textures, medium graphics, medium effects, medium shaders, low lighting, low physics, medium/low post processing. You can lower shaders (which make the game significantly uglier) for a little bit of a boost, but you will still see fps in the 20s and even teens on 2v2.

So if its playing "well" for you that's great, but personally, I am a little underwhelmed and I think numbers would be better than opinion so other people can decide for themselves if SC2 runs "well enough" for them.

 

Agreed

some people say 20fps is good, some say 60

Depends on your taste, but I was getting roughly 50fps in a small fight of a dozen units on the native resolution, medium settings

 

My M11x just arrived yesterday and I was looking forward to replacing my Dell XPS M1730 because I got sick of how big and bulky it is. Unfortunately, I'm having some problems with StarCraft II.

Despite updating drivers, whitelisting, and doing pretty much everything I could read that the helpful folks here have posted about, I share similar results with Crazy J, getting about 33 FPS on the recommended lower settings when the action is tame and anywhere from 14 to 25 when stuff is going down.

My M1730 is getting a consistent 60 to 50 with the exact same settings, and never dips below 35... I find this strange because its video card is weaker (512 RAM) and has a Core 2 Duo instead of the new i5 tech in my M11x.

This sort of leads me to believe that there is a significant issue with the core i technology and StarCraft II, especially because my friend who has a R1 M11x can run everything on high and maintain a great framerate.

Kind of disheartening.

 

There are many settings you can control on the Nvidia card itself.

Read up.

TweakGuides.com - Nvidia Forceware Tweak Guide

See if changing stuff will help. I know it did for counter strike source. Please REP if this increased your fps!

 

I think you are right.. Phase1 ran great in general, start of phase2 beta was really dodgy, end of phase2 was great! retail, back to being somewhat dodgy.

So there is hope for the small i7 cpu to do better. But lots of people on the bnet forums with i7s and massive machines are having big fps problems for what ever reason. (i7 is a good guess).

 

See the link to gamespots SC2 "on the cheap" guide to CPUs for SCII.

Starcraft II: On the Cheap - Features at GameSpot

"The bare minimum CPU required to run the game is a 2.6GHz Pentium 4, and like other games before it, that's like saying all you need is a pair of legs to run a marathon. We found quicker Core 2 CPUs to be more than adequate to play the game, with only the occasional slowdown when under heavy load. Quad core CPUs didn't help out all, which means that brute MHz is key. Switching up to the Core i7, we found that Starcraft stretches its legs if given the room. But as we mentioned, the number of cores doesn't matter; you can easily get a quick Core i5 or Core i3 as a substitute with minimal performance degradation..."

I didn't play beta, but unless someone did with the m11x R2 and tested their fps of beta and the fps of retail and can compare the numbers to prove a loss of FPS, I am thinking that maybe the 1.2 ghz CPU (even w/ turboboost) is just too weak to play with ~30fps in 2v2 battles, even on the recommended medium/low settings.

 

To danyune and Crazy J

In an earlier post, I posted my settings and that I was running an average of 45 fps. In 3v3 games even in late game situations I was still averaging 45 FPS. In 4v4 was when i would dip to the 30s mid game and 20s end game.

Old school tube televisions outputted at 30fps. It has also been said the human eye can't visualize faster than 60fps. I personally believe 30fps is the bare minimum any game should run to have some consistent smoothness.

 

xijulezix,

I tried your settings last night ( shaders to low, shadows to low... setting textures between medium/high didnt really anything FPS wise), and fps still hit 20s and even teens in 2v2. Army size was no where near 200.. probably between 80-120 for each person.

SCII definitely frequently goes below 30 fps with your settings. Maybe something is specifically wrong with my computer, but I doubt it. I might switch back to the dell drivers just to try them on SCII, but again, I doubt it will provide any increase in performance.

 

Crazy J, are you using the same drivers I am using? If so when you did the installation did you also re-install the physx driver? When I did the installation for the drivers I had issues with the computer slowing down and not running at what I thought was optimal until I read about re-installing the physx driver and it fixed all of my issues.

 

someone try doing this. tell me what happens

 

I am using the 258.96 nvidia drivers. Is there also a physx driver that I need to install that is seperate from the 258.96 drivers? If so, I will download them and test SCII tonight, and report the findings. I thought that the physx was just part of the display drivers...?

are you talking about this?

NVIDIA DRIVERS 9.10.0224

 

Crazy J I found this in a post when I installed 258.96 drivers. Some people had issues with the driver install and needed to re-do the PhysX after the driver install.
*************************************************

Download the latest version of PhysX - NVIDIA DRIVERS 9.10.0224
Uninstall current PhysX.
Reboot into safe mode.
Download and install Driver Sweeper - Guru3D - Driver Sweeper
Run DS and remove PhysX stuff.
Reboot and then install the new PhysX.

 

physX doesnt help SC2 performance at all i think, isnt it an option for only games that have the physX option.

 

That could very well be true. Although its worth a shot for Crazy J since he and I are having such different experiences with the same specs. This is a step that I did and he didn't so only time will tell if it actually makes a difference or not.

 

That sucks ....I just ordered the R2 (i7) three days ago and was hoping to play this game. So the Core2Duo actually runs the game better than the i7?

 

It has nothing to do with the CPU. If he's having trouble running the game at more than 30fps on lowest settings on the M11x, then I highly suspect that he's running the game on the Intel GPU.

There are tools out there by nVidia that tell you whether the nVidia 335M GPU is running, and what process(es) it is running. I would go there as the first way to verify which GPU is being used for the game.

Secondly, people with the M11x R2 seem to have the best success with the nVidia drivers v258.96 with modded INF (you need an altered INF file for the driver to install properly).

 

To UnivHQ - There are some benchmarks out there that actually show that i7 out performs core 2 duo. Also, shows that core 2 quad is no different from core 2 duo. The conclusion from most of the articles I read is that brute MHZ speed is better than more cores.

 

Just to clarify: I am running the latest drivers and I have used the GPU monitor that comes with the latest drivers to prove that SCII is running off the Nvidia card and not the integrated graphics card, so that cant be the issue. I added the starcraft 2 exe to the whitelist anyway just to make sure that game ran off the nvidia card.

I will check tonight weather or not PhysX is installed on my computer. While it probably isn't the issue, if PhysX is not installed, I may as well install it anyway, since maybe some other game can benefit.

I think the probability of something being wrong with my system is low, but I love to be surprised and get some better FPS with my favorite game.

My game can start off at 50+ fps but once probes starts getting pumped out, and any battle begins, its definitely not going to be in the 50s. Like i said 20s is more realistic, and big battles can/will drop into the teens.

My guess is its a CPU issue, but again, I didn't play beta and some claim that beta ran way faster... maybe its an SCII issue. I hope its either a video driver or SCII issue cause then there is hope, while the CPU is what it is... BTW did you overclock your system xijulezix? I am running stock speeds.

 

I am running at stock speeds. Also, you will most likely have the PhysX drivers installed already from the 258.96 driver package. The thing is reading on these forums there was numerous users noticed that it didn't install properly from the driver package so they would manually add the drivers afterwords.

 

I'm running the program that tells you when the Nvidia card is being used and it lists StarCraft II when the program runs. I whitelisted StarCraft II. I have the 258.96 modded inf drivers. What is the problem exactly then? This machine's components are pretty beastly yet StarCraft II runs at 20 FPS for some people? There is obviously something more going on.

 

You haven't overclocked the processor? Wouldn't overclocking give you better performance?

 

yes, OCing gives you better performance.

I'm mainly playing 1on1 ladder and im using the new 259.12 drivers. I have turned physics "off" in SC2 as you barely notice anyway.

So far it seems to run great on medium shaders, low light and what ever comes with medium shaders.

 

I tried overclocking my processor but I had to go all the way down to 156 before I stopped getting BSOD and could play a game of SCII. I watched a replay with some decent sized battles before overclocking and then watch the same replay with the same settings with OC @156, in an attempt to measure the overclock impact. Sadly, FPS were very similar and still hit the teens so it didn't seem like it was much better to me. Maybe someone with a faster/more stable overclock can see if they get better results?

Also I've been trying to figure out exactly how turboboost works... does it boost both cores, or only one? Also, can anyone recommend a good CPU monitoring program? I tried CPU Z but I don't think it lets you log the load/speed of the CPU while playing a game of SCII. I would love to see what my CPU is doing while I am playing...

Maybe I am expecting too much from an 11 inch machine... I was really hoping for 30 fps medium settings in combat in 2v2 though!

 

Make sure you're not running in windowed fullscreen mode in Starcraft, it knocked 20fps off when I tried it.

Which brings me on to my question This game gives 1360x768 as the option, but our lovely little m11xs have 1366x768 resolutions. I tried altering the variable file to 1366 width but it just goes to 1280x720 instead. Has anyone discovered a fix?

 

lol. I officially hate this computer. I just set everything as low as it could go, and it still freakin gets fps in the teens. Unbelievably disappointing.

This is while I am watching a 1v1 replay; it looks awful, and runs awful.

Really 14 FPS in 1v1 on low?? I bet this POS couldnt run pong either... hell pong probably looks better than SCII on low!

 

My bad. 14 fps I meant to say 12. I wish 14 was the minimum. I wasnt even half way through the replay and army counts were 120 and 130. If i wasnt so pissed I bet I could get this bad boy in the single digits.

 

crazy its not the machine, read the battlenet forums. plenty of people are having issues from all sorts of strange combinations.

It can be everything from chipset drivers, graphics drivers, sound drivers, left over beta install of Starcraft 2 and so on.

 

Why so bad? ppl are running it on Ultra with better fps than that. link

 

I should have the same chipset/graphic/sound drivers as everyone else, and I never played the beta.

The only thing I can think of is that maybe my CPU is throttling or something, does anyone know a good CPU logging/monitoring program that I could use to check what my CPU is doing while watching a SCII replay...?

 

I can't figure this out. After browsing the battle.net forums, it seems like a lot of people are having difficulties like thomaskc said, but I can't really identify any common link.

This thread, StarCraft II, which goes into the system requirements in detail, states in the processor section that i3,i5, and i7 all exceed the requirements. It does seem like people with the quad cores are the most effected, though.

Is it some weird driver or program problem that only a handful of people experience?

I overclocked to max and it seemed to help, but even on the recommended (ie: medium and low) settings with no physics my FPS drops to 20 or lower during big battles.

 

It is the curse of the R2

 

I have an R2 and I really can't fathom why so many of you are having issues. I did a low level format and changed my stock HD to a Vertex II SSD drive. Also, running at the specs I previously posted and I'm not receiving any of your horrendous average FPS.

 

I turned on my FPS counter last night just to see what I had. I played through the zerg/zombie infestation mission and I never saw it drop below 20fps. I can't count how many zombies came at night, but I had 200 units worth of supply depots maxed out and it was quite smooth for me.

No overclocking. Nothing special.

Edit: High settings, native resolution full screen.