Starcraft 2 on M15X lag ?!

Hi all,

I installed Starcraft II on my m15x two days ago.

Fisrt time I played I got a superb framerate with absolutely no lag. I played the first 5 missions of the campaign.

Then, I turned off my computer for the night.

Next day, I started SCII again and I noticed some lag in the cinematics, the lips were not following the voices. Then, in game it got worse, the game started to have some real lag for no apparent reasons.

I rebooted, installed new drivers, even checked missions I already played to see if the lag was just in the newer missions. Nothing works. And no , im not in stealth mode

Here is my stats:
Core I7 920 - GTX 260 M - 8 gig ram 1333

I was playing in 1920x1080 all settings on ultra.

To my knowledge, my computer should run this game with no lag at all right?

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

You should check out 51550Joker's thread about CPU and GPU throttling issues.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...e-investigation-stock-clocks-overclocked.html

 

I'm pretty sure you are having throttle issue. 920xm and 260m combo are known to have throttle. Test it out with throttlestop and see if the problem resolved.
Here link to it. http://www.mediafire.com/?ddm747dztrd87dp

 

I already took a look, the only thing about this is I don't want to damage my system. Is there any risk using throttlestop.

And it look pretty complicated in jokers post. Is there any quick step guide?

 

There is no risk. Just download and run the program. Remember to check the 3 box (clock Modulation, Chipset Clock Mod, and Set Multiplier).

 

you're not overclocking by using throttlestop, not pushing the system above its specs in any way. just stopping this stupid bug from happening.

 

I have had no issues with starcraft 2 since beta and now with the official launch of the game i stall have no issues i love it ^^... i have however reverted back to to A05 bios instead of A06 due to the fan setting and increase in temps on the GPU and CPU i have found that A05 bois setting work alot better in cooling my system. I also have the laytest drivers from nvidia.com as well.

 

It could be that you are actually running in stealth mode. There appears to be a problem whereby Stealth will activate - whether or not you told it to - randomly. The fix is easy enough, just turn Stealth Mode on and then off again (can require a restart). In the event that this doesn't work, download EVGA precision, turn stealth mode on, then off and then set the clocks to default in EVGA and apply.

 

Bagdad - I though I had throttling issues as well.

Specs System Specs
OS: Win7 64bit
Intel i7 720
4GB DDR3 1066
nVidia GeForce GT 240M

I was getting random lag in game and I thought it was related to the 'throttling' issue I read about on this forums.

through trial and error I was able to limit the case of the random lag in game to the Sound Card and not the video card. My M15x never got above 65c while playing the game but still the system was lagging for unknown reasons.

I was able to tie the points of lag down to Campaign only when I was in a mission and voices would overlay to talk to each other.

I went into my Sound Setting and turned off 'reverb' and played 5 missions without a single point of lag.

I saw a post of the sc2 forums today where someone stated in the variables.txt file the sound is set to 44100 Hz but his sound card was set to 48000 Hz. He changed his setting to 44100 Hz and had all issues go away.

I have not tested this out yet but you can give it a try by doing the following

Right Click on the Sound Control by your clock, select Playback devices, select your speakers and click properties, go to the last tab and select the 44100 Hz.

I am hoping that making this change will allow me to turn reverb back on but I won't know until tonight or tomorrow if change the Hz to 44100 will work.

 

My spec (week old today).
I7 740, 5850, 1333mhz 4gb ram 1080p ultra settings
and the only choppy bits I was getting were the video sequences.
Both cpu and grahpics cards at stock an neither were geting warm or being pushed which puzzled me somewhat.


I can confirm the changes you mentioned quoted above, work a treat.

cheers for that.

 

i no lag at all but i did set my audio to 44100hz awhile back.

 

Awesome - I can now look forward to a solid night of SC2 tonight.

 

So sound card was lagging? pfff lol..

SC2 is in my list of "Games to Install™" when my m15x arrives, good to know

 

Well well, some update.

First; I tried the sound settings to both my speakers and headphones to 44100, it didnt changed anything.

Second; I tried intalling and running throttlestop with the 3 checkboxes. It didnt seems it changed anything either.

So i'm still having theses slowdowns in missions and cutscenes.

Something I forgot to menting in my first post; first time I played with the super nice fps, my fans were working full capacity the second I started the game till I turned it off.

Now what i'm noticing is that the fans is really silent all the time I play, exept some times to times it goes full capacity.

Could it be related to that ?

Any more ideas of what I should try next ?

thanks

 

what bit rate did you use?
ive set mine to 24bit, not sure if that makes a difference or not.

 

I noticed my processor driver are dating from 2006, could it be that ?

 

Bagdad - One other thing I did before the sound settings was to flash my bios to A06, uninstalled my video card drivers and installed them again from nVidia and uninstalled Command Center and installed the newer version.

Not that I think Command Center had anything to do with anything but after the list above my video card was not over heating, my FPS became stable, game freezes stopped and I was able to up my graphics to High. I have not tried Ultra yet.

I got the Bios Update and Command Center update from dells update site.

 

I just installed the other day on my M15X, I ran Fraps then started up a game as a spectator with 8 AI's. Frame rate averaged 40-43 on Ultra settings (1600x900) with some dips down to 30, overall I was surprised at how well it ran. I had made the following update to the variables.txt file;

frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60

From what I could see Throttling, lag etc.. were not an issue

 

In a way this is why I prefer console gaming... everything is just click and go. However whats the point of owning a gaming PC if you don't wanna get your hands dirty Great job on the troubleshooting guys, gonna need to re read this when I get my M15x

PC's FTW!

 

You guys need to plug this into your variables file. My GPU almost fried because SC2 can overheat it to death. What happens is the menus are pretty simple but theres no cap to the fps set by the game so your GPU keeps rendering to the point of killing itself... I got a blue screen actually cause my system temps went up so high by leaving it on the menu... checked the menu and it was at 250+ fps.... yikes.

frameratecapglue=30
frameratecap=60

Feel free the change the numbers, google starcraft 2 overheating for the blue post from bliz, im lazy.

 

I am also seeing some performance issues on my m15x (i7 720QM GTX 260). It runs perfectly on power but I see slow downs on battery. Any thoughts?

 

when on battery the your system will auto down clock it self. so the performance will not be same as plugged in. only way to to solve it is to use throttle stop for cpu and a oc program for the gpu. but you battery will drain super fast.

 

Thanks for the response. Will that case any heating issues? Does the throttling come from settings in the BIOS or within Windows?

 

Yo appnono,

Yeah I discovered my bios was still a05 yesterday, I already did the update to a06 when i saw your post.

The only thing i'm not sure about getting the latest nvidia is that last time I did (258.96) my system was freezing for no apparent reason.

And I have to most recent command center too, maybe I need to uninstall first ?

But I wonder if I was hallucinating or something, cause nobody confirmed that he had 1920x1080 all ultra running smooth yet.

I swear I had over 30 fps all time when playing the first time with these setting. Then after lag appeared and stayed.

 

From what I can tell, enabling V-sync in the graphics options can prevent this as well...as it syncs the framerate max to your monitors default refresh rate...which is usually 60. Some people say it causes a slight performance hit, but I haven't really noticed much difference.

 

Bagdad,
Sorry for the delayed response. I am running the latest driver from nVidia's site and I haven't noticed any issues.

I can't remember where I read it but I read somewhere that you need to uninstall Command Center before trying to upgrade it. If I can remember where I saw it at I will post the link.

I am currently running on High right now with an average FPS of about 40. I only have the nVidia 240m so I am considering that a huge win for me. I also did the change to the variable.txt file for the FPS caps and my video card has not remotely warmed up since.

If you still have issues let me know and I will try to recap everything I did in detail for you to check off against.

Also - I can't remember if you had the 240m or the 260m. If it is the 260m I think it is a known issue and Blizzard is working to address it.

 

I just got my Alienware M15x today with i7 740QM GeForce GTX260M and 8GB Ram. I'm having lag problem with SC2 also. I have to turn setting down to medium and getting only 10-15 fps. Any idea why i'm getting this low fps?

 

Konakana have you checked to make sure you are not in Stealth Mode?

 

Yea it seems I hit Stealth Mode accidentally ><
Now I have fps 30-35 on high setting

 

Apologies for bumping this thread, but I wanted to make sure that it wasn't just me that was having issues with the latest StarCraft II Patch.

To be honest, it feels like the game isn't using my GTX 460M [AT ALL].
Also, how can I check whether Stealth Mode is on or off? I'm aware that there's a program for it somewhere on these forums, but I don't know where it is or whether it has compatibility issues in certain scenarios.

Summary: Latest patch seems to have SCREWED the FPS.

 

Here's the stealth mode indicator from wattos.

It's hard to tell stealth mode is on or off without this little program... the little speedometer at the right side of the touchpanel is a bit brighter when on (you want it off).

 

Thanks svl7, Yeah, It's really hard to see when stealth mode is on. Thanks for the link, I really appreciate it. Anyway, I figured out what the problem was for my StarCraft II FPS.

Basically, since the last patch the "CPU", processor intensive graphics, things like reflection, physics, models, & effects have become several times more intensive. By turning them off or lowering them you can achieve much higher frame rates.

I managed Ultra @ 1024x768 @ 60 FPS, High @ 80 FFPS, Medium @ 100 & Low at 120+ (Used 1024x768 as the baseline) because custom games can be really processor intensive.

 

That is really weird. Before the latest patch, the only way I could maintain a stable 60 was at medium at my native 1600x900. With the inclusion of the open space ambient occlusion setting and the new extreme setting, I can maintain 60fps for the most part and never dip below 35. Before the patch on ultra, I was getting fps between 20-30 constantly. I was extremely happy with the new patch because it seems like they optimized the game.

 

Set as Ultra, starcraftII I can only get 19 fps on m15x. On my desktop it has 78 fps. Are there any problem? I think the m15x shouldn't have such a low fps.

 

That's because SCII is pretty CPU dependent afaik, you're desktop seems to have a pretty nice CPU, the 740QM simply can't keep up with a i7 920...

 

I too have had problems with Starcraft II, moreso after going from the Geforce 260m to the Radeon 6970m. With the 260m, running everything on Ultra at 1080 resolution, it was generally pretty good with a few slowdowns when there were a lot of units on the screen, or one of those Protoss Motherships around. Definitely playable though.

After updating to the 6970m and 920xm processor, I was getting really high framerates, but also a lot of screen tearing. Turning on v-sync fixed the tearing, but when scrolling over high detail areas of the map I was getting drops in fps that I found really irritating.

I found putting:
frameratecap=60
frameratecapGlue=60
in the variables.txt file and running vsync made everything much smoother.

I still had an issue when scrolling over water, which I fixed by disabling reflections. It's weird because it says reflections are CPU dependent and I have the 920xm. Using throttlestop and increasing the multipliers didn't seem to improve the issue either.

Anyway, now I have a smooth game with a constant 60fps, no screen tearing and no slow downs.

Hope this helps.

 

That's crazy. I have ONLY had problems since the game first came out. Right now, if I play a custom game online the game crashes everytime guaranteed. So incredibly frustrating.

 

So I finally figure out how to play SC2 smoothly. The problem was not the bios (or maybe that was one of the reasons), but the 3d settings on the nvidia control panel. So if you have a gtx 260m on your system and your fps drops during a game to the point it becomes unplayable even after the bios update, try this:

- Download the drivers fro the video card from Dell. Right now the most updated version in the site is 257.38. This fix probably works with newer versions from the nvidia website but since the 275.33 version made most computers unstable I'd try to stay away from them.

-Open the Nvidia Control Panel by right clicking on your desktop.

-Move to the 3d Settings tab and switch the energy settings from adaptable to maximum performance.

That's it! My computer was only able to play SC2 at 15fps on medium settings and dropped to 2fps during big battles. My guess is that when the processor was maxed out on certain situations, the video card suffered from a power dropped somehow. After changing these settings I'm able to play with high graphics with a fps ranging between 55 and 60fps even with mother ships cloaking units in 4vs4 battles. I monitored the gpu temperature during gameplay and it only gets up to 72 with only half of the video memory being used so SC2 is probably playing in ultra-settings with no problem.

Good luck!