Through helping people in the past few weeks a lot with diagnosing and fixing some of the performance and input issues they've experienced while migrating ShieldBattery, I've come to realize that there's a lot of misconceptions around how certain BW settings work and why some options really should never be used.

While ShieldBattery does provide some brief guidance, we try to support every setting available in StarCraft: Remastered. However, for new people coming in or coming back to BW after a long hiatus, it's best to have a reference guide for both Battle.net and ShieldBattery.

Video Settings

Display Mode: Windowed (Fullscreen)
As long as you have a recent Windows version and you have this option enabled:

there's no performance reason to play in exclusive Full screen.

SC:R does allow you to apply extra brightness when in Full screen mode, which you can't do in Windowed Fullscreen, but ShieldBattery allows you to play in Windowed Fullscreen with custom brightness.

Non-full screen windowed mode adds input delay and should be avoided.

Vertical sync: Off
This makes input lag really bad if you're also using windowed mode or windowed full screen. If you're on SB, frame pacing or G-Sync is recommended, if you're playing on Bnet, I recommend keeping this off and making sure your FPS cap is sufficiently high.

Input Settings

Hardware cursor: On
If you turn this off you're using a software cursor and your input becomes very laggy. Never turn this off

Mouse scaling: Off
Very important to keep this off, as enabling this will result in you reverting back to a software cursor AND getting bad mouse scaling code that Blizzard copied off of ShieldBattery a decade ago.
Apparently Stork has been using this since Remastered, no wonder he can't click his high templar in time.


Custom mouse sensitivity:
I just want to clarify how this works.
When you're on a hardware cursor, and you have custom mouse sensitivity off, your mouse will travel across your screen at the exact same input speed as it does in Windows.
If you turn it on, and set it to the exact same setting as your Windows cursor speed (you will see it goes 1-20 in windows, 0-100 in BW with 5-size steps), it will still move at the exact same speed as when using your mouse in Windows.
If you turn it on and set a custom mouse speed, StarCraft will manually set your Windows mouse speed to your overridden SC value every time your SC window goes in focus, and set back the old Windows value when it loses focus.