Starcraft II on M11x - General Discussion

Sounds interesting..

 

ok i am uploading the drivers now. will post a new thread for it when its done. by the way dont get too excited. like i said its not anything new. in fact its just some older drivers but modded to work with our R2. I get fairly decent performance in most of the games I have tested from L4D2 > Just Cause 2 > BFBC2 > Killing floor > WOW > Starcraft 2 All manage to have Nvidia kicking in. Thou some of the games require you to still add them manually to the whitelist.

You will lose the Optimus State Viewer thou since this is not the 258.89 set. But I think I can live with that as long as I know my games are already running with the GT335M. This driver is good for those who run games with PB, NProtect and such. I cant test every of them since I dont have so many games that uses those stuffs. But so far I have tested BFBC2 online (PB) 30mins into game and still going. And I tested another Korean MMO Continent of the Ninth which uses NProtecft I manage to clear an instance without being kick out of the game. So I say its all good. I remember with 258.89 I cant even reach my character selection screen before I got kicked out. So this driver is a keeper for me for now.

 

brilliant.. looking forward to give them a go

 

its here http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...timus-drivers-189-79-r2-only.html#post6581615

 

Hey good find thomaskc. I downloaded evga precision and tested starcraft and can confirm the results both in windowed and in full screen. Although my GPU load was around ~50%. I then ran some crysis. In crysis windowed, gpu load was around ~60 in window mode but in fullscreen mode it was was 95+%.

SCII does not appear to be using the GPU very effectively. I noticed you posted the same thing on battle.net forums. I will respond there as well. In fact, I am so happy you discovered this: Rep !

 

Thanks CrazyJ

Yeah I noticed the cpu use as well how ever I am not sure it's a bad thing. If you go to affinity and make sc2.exe only use cpu 0 and 2 so it uses 2 threads out of the 4, those two will go to 95% when running sc2. So I think its just because it spreads it out efficiently over the four.

Im about to test the drivers "kopicha" put up and see if that changes anything.

 

I just tested the nvidia 189.79 drivers and they do seem to work a bit better with starcraft II.

http://thomaskc.dk/sc2/sc2_.jpg

this was taken just after I closed starcraft II and as you can see the clock speeds work and it is using a bit more of gpu, it seems to jump between 35% and 48% gpu usage.

The OC'ed i7 is not maxed out by the look of it in task manager so I doubt that its because its bottlenecked by that either.

Maybe it really is just optimus support?

 

so those drivers give you better fps in SC2?

 

I need a bit more testing, but it does (from watching a replay of my games yesterday) seem like the slowdowns is still there, just less! so that must mean yes they do Ill play some games today see on different graphics settings.

 

Anyone having issues with the game locking up for 2-3seconds a time every once in a while? I seem to have decent fps but it seems like at constant intervals it will happen

 

did you happento tweak your variables.txt? theres a known bug that happens if you tweak an incorrect setting. Alternatively try defragmenting your sc2 directory

 

Thanks for the modified drivers, it seems that the drivers are what's bottlenecking SC2 performance. I was wondering if it was possible to modify the R1 video drivers since i hear it runs a lot better on that?

Thanks for the work!

 

am at work now. maybe when i get back I will share my in game gfx settings and you can test it. I had some mixture of ultra high mid and low settings across. imo they still look amazing in what I have done with the gfx settings and still manage pretty good fps. actually i think this set of driver i posted actually run better in SC2 as compared to 258.89. I remember the last time before I refresh my system back to factory image I was running on the 258.89 set and I dont remember seeing myself hit pass 50fps with the same setting. Now with this driver I do see that happening and quite consistent in the 40+ range and never dip below 30 as far as I am aware. one of the main thing is with all these said I dont have anything OC'ed. both CPU and GPU running stock clock.

 

it should not be hard to mod the driver to work with R1 but you will have to sacrifice the gfx switching portion. it would be like what steven is having on his R1 atm. as Nautis ever mention before to create a drivers to support hybrid require some driver signing. I am no expert in that as I dont have an R1 either. This is my first laptop that support switchable gfx.

maybe Nautis would be in a better position to comment for the R1 driver modding portion as he is the man!

 

Nope, havent tweaked anything, and how do I go about defragmenting the sc2 directory?

 

Woah 40, i am only in the 25-30 range on medium settings, any ideas of what i can do?

 

sounds good mate, looking forward, lets do some testing.

 

Hold on, after changing the settings to full screen and refresh rate to 60 it shot up, any reason why full screen is getting a much higher fps then windowed maximized? I prefer using window maxed because it multitasking a lot easier.

 

try using gamebooster

 

Its always been like that, its a lot heavier on the system to run stuff in a window.

 

i can share my settings when i get home. but for now what I can say is the game can get rather cpu intensive as the game progress. its obvious as the fps tend to drop further deep into the game up to the end. so its advisable that when you want to play SC2 make sure you dont have any thing that hogs your cpu resource by any mean. every little counts. like steam, msn/aol/yahoo or any sort of IM client.

gamebooster that some ppl recommend can be a good helper to off load stuffs that hog your cpu.

 

I don't think that's why, it seems that the GPU activity majoring decreases in windowed mode then full screen so i think it's the net-book trying to idle/decrease GPU performance for windowed applications. I could be wrong but that is what it seems like.

Anyway the SC2 settings would be great!

 

If you are playing in windowed mode aero may not e disabling as it does when you play a fullscreen game. Having that running while playing will definetly impact performance

 

The way windows allocated resources is totally different from fullscreen to window mode. in fullscreen the game gets everything, in window mode you still have window behind it (around it) that takes priority.

 

oh man, looking at this thread has got me worried. I have pretty well decided to order an R2 m11x with an i7 processor, and I have already bought scII to play it on. Now I'm wondering if I should get the R1 instead, if it'll be able to play the game better...

 

From my recent experience if you get the modified graphics drivers and over-clock/turbo boost your CPU the fps should be smooth enough while still looking awesome, but i am waiting to try kopi's SC2 settings xD.

 

I don't have experience w/ RI, but I haven't been impressed with my R2 and SCII. Other people report differently, so who knows... its definitely a risk though.

It would be extremely helpful to get as much data as possible about the GPU load issue thomaskc reported a couple posts back. Could everyone run some games / replays using EVGA precision, and report your system/video drivers/scII settings/and your GPU load % (just alt tab out of the game every 5 minutes or so and look at the ranges your GPU load % is in)?

It seems odd that me and thomaskc have significantly less than 100% GPU load, and we are wondering how widespread this GPU behavior is on other m11xs (both R1 and R2). Perhaps its the source of the problems we are having.

Thanks!

 

I 100% regret getting this brick of an expensive "gaming" laptop which fails on every aspect of performance. unfortunately im stuck with this thing so I hope something changes radically soon.

 

I'm starting to regret the very same thing even though i haven't even received it. Should've bought the ENVY 14.

 

My thought exactly... you how ever can still return it strait away! i think you have 7 days to do so.

I found out too late... so now we just gotta hope they freakin fix this brick.

 

I have a slight fear... after reinstalling the 258.96 drivers and seeing the gpu use to jump up and down from 30% to 55% in window mode (and fullscreen) when running starcraft II, and it doesn't matter if I change the gpu heavy settings to high or to low.. only thing that changes a tiny bit is if I lower the gpu stuff to absolute minimum, then I get like 3-4 fps on avg.

Which I hope... is not an indication because that basically means the ULV cpu is as crappy as I feared it would be... and that it creates the biggest bottlekneck ever seen on a laptop.

 

I was reading this thread out of curiosity, since I dont have the game. However, taking into account that most people with R1 models (ULV C2D) can run the game fine and most issues seem to happen with R2 models (ULV i#), plus in other thread someone reported issues with the old sim city 4 in a R2 even after whitelistening it, I would guess that the problem is related to optimus, not cpu.

Edit: another post about nvidia doesn't kicking in even after whitelist in a R2.

 

Cherude, I really hope you are correct. Its annoying because the laptop is actually bloody nice for its size, but it just fails on all the parts its meant to do well on...

 

I get around 27-35 fps no matter setting in the replay i tested... battle size, creep and all didn't matter much.

Ironic enough It seems to use 65% gpu steady in the menus. but as soon as you start the game its all over, and never really past 55% gpu where it peaks.

non of the cores on the cpu are maxed or anything like that, If you set only two of them under affinity it will use those a bit more but never maxed.

 

Thomas,

I saw in a thread I read the other day a guy was running this with another game running in the background - think he said he had torchlight running in the character select screen and got major framerate boosts.

Forgive me if he was talking s**t - but may be worth a try?

Still trying to get SC2 to recognise my graphics card......

Good Luck!!

 

thomaskc:

I mentioned several days ago that I thought it was the CPU and was trying to figure out how to monitor it. However, it was your discovery yesterday that changed my mind.

I just can't understand how it could be the CPU, since task manager is reporting less than 100% CPU load. With a min req of pentium 4 2.6 ghz, you would think that the i7 would run low better than FPS in the teens and 20s.

I think we should get as much data about the GPU load as possible, and report the issue to nvidia. If its a blizzard or driver issue, there is hope for a fix.

Still, as of right now, there is no way I would recommended someone get the m11x R2 for SCII. I got it based on people saying it ran like butter, and that is not the case for me.

 

Plus like i said in the battle.net forum, the m11x can run games that have higher CPU reqs than SCII. Something sure the hell isnt right; but as of now, I am thinking it's not the CPU.

 

Makes some sense. The game in the background could serve to kick in nvidia.

 

I read that post about the game in the background to start up the GPU. However, I think he reported his GPU activity was 0, and ours is ~50%. That would seem to indictate our GPU is working, but not very effectively.

Hell, why not try it though? Everything is worth at shot at this point. Ill give it a shot later on today and if it improves anything I will post.

 

PMI, but how do you tell which GPU you're using?

 

New drivers have a monitoring system that tells you when the Nvidia GPU is active, which can be enabled from the control panel. You can also use EVGA Precision and see if there is GPU activity.

 

Playing starcraft 2 in my laptop's battery mode with high performance and max performance on graphic seems shorten my R2' battery. It can last about 1.5 hours only >.<

 

No wonder? Its super heavy on both cpu and gpu.

 

Blizzard has officially changed the system requirements taking that stance that the m11x R1 and R2 do not meet the minimum system requirements... I am crafting a response to this for the Battle.net forums now... highly disappointed.

DO NOT BUY THE M11X IF YOU WANT TO PLAY SC2 AS BLIZZARD'S STANCE AS THAT THE COMPUTER CPU IS TOO WEAK TO MEET THE REQUIREMENTS!

StarCraft II
* Intel i3/i5/i7 desktop processors exceed the minimum requirements. Laptop models under 2.4 GHz fall under the system requirements.

Earlier today all i3 i5 and i7 surpassed minimum requirements... not anymore... I will post a link to my response once I have finished it...

 

Wait, so it's not playable on med to high settings with a steady 30 fps?

 

Mine is with around 40+ as long as you have your CPU to OC/TURBO with the modified drivers it should be fine.

 

It is NOT playable in any way unless you turn off so much stuff that its not starcraft II anymore! don't be fooled by people who claim it runs smooth, it doesn't.

Maybe one should give Dell a call... this calls for a refund battle, I have 0 use for this laptop now.

 

i just did a 3v3 with comps with a lot of units the lowest it dropped to was 15 or so but usually around 30+ seemed ok for me.. and this is with ty oc fsb at 150 only. im gonna try multiplayer game later

 

So the other ppl saying they can run it fine are lying? Someone should post their benchmark for SC2.

 

they are not lying, they are just happy with 40 fps early game and 16-25 fps mid game no matter setting. And im talking about 1on1.