Starcraft II on Sony Vaio Z

^Are you able to change your screen brightness?

 

Yeah it all works fine, onscreen display and everything. Not sure where people got the idea that screen brightness wouldnt work. Been using this for months now with different drivers.

 

See its comments like yours that makes so many forums utterly useless. If you don't have anything helpful to share, dont share anything.

We don't care if you think its not a gaming laptop, people buy laptops for a lot of reasons but thats still not the point!

Thanks for nothing!



Might as well start a netbook gaming thread then and see how many useful posts you can find. And the point of my comment was to ask a simple and reasonable question. "Why did I lose the Indy 500 in my Civic"?

 

please refer all car related question to their own specific forum, in this case a honda civic would not be able to participate in the Indy 500 due to engine and manafatures policies and even if we negate such variables from the equation and a stock car would be allowed to compete due to the lack of horsepower and standard weight of the car, if would be a non realistic competition as the race cars would easily outrace the civic

 

Troll as you may, but please do it somewhere else. For those of us who chose a Z for both it's power and portability and the fact that it can run SC2 (or in my case BFBC2) decently enough is an added bonus. It's nice to see what others can do with their Z and possibly what i can do with my own.

 

I find it very strange that SC2 runs so 'badly' on the Vaio Z because the cpu / gpu usage and memory use is far from reached, and if I bump up settings to fill it up, it just runs even worse... point is the very very base it seems like the Z is still struggeling as more units and shown. sometimes it nearly feels like that its a 256mb video memory card and not a 1GB that's stuck to the 330m.

 

i seem to remember hearing that adding more units is a CPU stressor. something about duplicating one unit many times and only having to recalculate some lighting effects if appropriate. don't quote me....

 

I just ran a replay test while monitoring my gpu on my 2nd screen.

Heh my gpu at any point used MAX 140mb ram out of the 1GB available with my current settings (tweaked to death performance).

I will run the same just to see cpu usage, but I fear that even that won't max out and that its just the way sc2 does things... ill report back.

EDIT:

So as expected the cpu's does not max out yet it seems the overall problem for the vaio Z is just share unit numbers. lowering detail help a bit, but a certain point it just dies slowly fps wise even though the system is not 'overloading' if you like.

Which basically is something we can't do anything about it seems? :/

 

What settings are you playing on? I can play at medium on FHD, but if the laptop starts overheating it slows to a crawl for some reason. So I play on low settings and it works fine, although I admit I would have expected better.

 

What's your thermal strategy in VAIO control center set to?

 

is gpu usage close to maxing out? like 80%?

 

Not that I am aware of, the gpu is not heavily used in starcraft 2 and im running setting below "low" settings so no..

A lot of people have this problem where they get the same fps on low and on ultra and only thing changing it is amount of units and buildings over time. This is even on high end desktop systems that die down for what ever reason.

starcraft II also always seems to be the only game doing this.

 

You wont see 100% load on the cpu or the gpu on todays games. For example another game that is cpu intensive is shogun 2, however people will max out at 60% of cpu usage, with of 80% spikes of load in the 1st core, for the other cores the usage goes down.

 

i find, the most favorable result is attained

by setting the thermal strategy to "silent" and putting it on speed.

the both gpu and cpu stay below 82C with i7-620m.

 

I do not have heat issues, but I don't understand why you would get better results by setting the thermal strategy to "silent" ?? when that basically allowed the cpu to throttle / run at lower speeds to lower fan noise?

Is this something you have tested and compared to "performance" or?

 

i run sc2 at 1300x900 at medium settings, and now after about a year of ownership the laptop gets quite hot, i could push it more but even now, if i put a beer to the left of my Z in 10 mins itl be hot. I dont like the feeling that if you blocked the vent the laptop would overheat in 5 seconds.

 

Im sorry but that is just silly, what did you expect? and the fact that you can heat a beer next to it is a good sign! It means the heat is actually leaving you laptop preventing if from overheating!

The vaio Z is one of the coolest laptops I have had (its laptop no. 6) under heavy load and. I don't think you realise how common it is for a lot of laptops to just fail and crash before your beer gets heated.

 

Hello.. When I started this thread never thought it would be that popular.
The question is - anyone tried SC2 on new Z21?
What are your thoughts?
Thanks