A question about Starcraft 2 performance

Speaking in general, with a decent CPU and GPU, would Starcraft 2 benefit more from overclocking the CPU or the GPU?

 

You shouldn't want to overclock either for consistent gaming, but with sc2 you'll benefit more from a fast dual core cpu

 

Sure it will help, as it would with any game. However overclocking in most cases does not make a huge difference unless its a very large overclock. If its stable though cant hurt to have an extra fps or two.

Nothing wrong with overclocking constantly as long as you have tested i and know its stable. My Q6600 has been doing 3.6ghz 24/7 for the last few years and it was a 2.4ghz cpu and my GPU's always do about +100 to core/memory and never have I had hardware failure.

Laptops are much more limited in how much overclocking they can do in both terms of how much they can overclock and how much they can handle an oveclock but it can still be done.

My G73 lets the i7 720QM go from 1.6ghz to 1.75ghz no problems and the GPU can handle +50/50 without any problems.

 

Depends on which is the bottleneck...

Gaming performance is often restricted based on a "weakest link"; if the GPU is running at top speed all the time and can barely keep up, then it won't matter how fast your CPU is, your GPU will only display so many frames in a second. Likewise if your CPU is weak and paired with a high end GPU.

 

my question is can you optimized so sc2 will use more gpu than cpu? Perhaps there isn't one but the possibilities...

 

It is but there is currently a known issue with SLi, the FPS will drop to 8 to 10 in on the bridge only. Has something to do with shadows. Blizzard is looking into it.

 

He asked if there was a way to increase gpu and reduce cpu basically. LIke a see-saw with the cpu on one side and the gpu on the other to help balance the wait of the games demand between the two evenly rather than having a bottleneck from having one side bottom out rather than evenly balance.

SLI does not work right now, when it is enabled what will happen is you will get more gpu power IF your single GPU was already @ 100% load if it was not and the cpu was the limit it will continue to be the limit.

You can put more load on the GPU if the CPU power is not behind it to run it.

If your GPU was 100% and SLI is enabled it will still actually increase the CPU load because it takes more cpu power to arbitrate two GPU's instead of one. But you will get more load on both the CPU & GPU when SLI is enabled if you had headroom on the cpu and the single gpu was maxed out.

So the way I take the question is "is there a way to reduce cpu load, and increase gpu load" as a way to balance out the load on a system with a strong gpu and weak cpu.

The answer is not so much, you can easily turn down graphics settings to reduce the strain on the gpu but as with any RTS game the vast majority of the CPU load is not so much from the graphics card but from the AI/Physics and other things.

If your GPU is 100% and CPU less than 100% and you turn down graphics settings it will only raise the cpu load higher since the GPU will start rendering more frames thus a higher load on the cpu the game will run better as a result though since you will be utilizing more of your system power and rending more frames with the gpu.

 

Thanks for all of your answers guys, I really appreciate it!