I have recently been struggling with lag during large 200/200 ish battles, and I noticed that my framerate drops to about 15-20 in a large battle and to about 5-7 if there are large numbers of zerglings on the field. What do you think is an acceptable framerate for large battles where force field placement and small colossus adjustments often make or break you?

I am about 3200 masters toss on ladder.

susySquark

United States1692 Posts

March 23 2011 02:59 GMT

I've never really experienced anything lower than 60 since I have medium settings and vsync on, so I just keep it pegged at 60 fps even at the craziest of moments. I'd say anything lower than 30 or so would start to affect how well I could micro though.

cynical

Canada589 Posts

March 23 2011 03:02 GMT

What does it matter what league you're in if you're wondering about FPS rate?

cmpcmp

84 Posts

March 23 2011 03:14 GMT

The league matters because I feel that it is affecting my play more than it might affect a bronze "a" mover, especially when I am trying to micro a large battle against the increasingly popular ling/bling heavy zerg with drops or muta ling. When there is a battle and I have 10 or fewer frames per second it really sucks.

vicariouscheese

United States589 Posts

March 23 2011 03:21 GMT

On March 23 2011 12:14 cmpcmp wrote:
The league matters because I feel that it is affecting my play more than it might affect a bronze "a" mover, especially when I am trying to micro a large battle against the increasingly popular ling/bling heavy zerg with drops or muta ling. When there is a battle and I have 10 or fewer frames per second it really sucks.

If you're a scrub at least 30fps because OMG YOU CANT SEE MORE THAN THAT JESUS

but seriously make sure you get at least your monitor's refresh rate, which is usually 60hz for lcd's. So set it to low-

Yung

United States727 Posts

March 23 2011 03:25 GMT

Are you playing on low, if so save up a few hundred dollars and biuld a cheap new pc.

Xapti

Canada2473 Posts

March 23 2011 03:28 GMT

This is a pretty good question actually.

While APM dosen't mean too much in and of itself, I had some really amazing results from when I played at a ~30FPS cap, maybe 35, and had 1 video card, and then with the cap increased to like 75FPS (with 2 video cards in crossfire, not that the one card couldn't have handled higher FPS on it's own).

My APM had seemingly gone up from like 110 to 155, which was pretty crazy. This may have just been luck as well as a small degree of improvement, but I don't see how it could account for everything (especially the improvement since I played SCBW for a long long time, and the APM/FPS change was only within like a week)

I'd say running somewhere around 60FPS can be pretty useful/important, and capping it somewhere around there as well.

Somewhat recently I also disabled Vsync in favor of an FPS cap instead. This is because now only does vsync potentially slow FPS by a small bit normally (when it's not capped), but when it can't run at it's vsync rate (lets say many units on thte screen and such), it will drop the FPS to a SIGNIFICANTLY lower FPS, like 1/2 of your vsync FPS, even if it is possible to run at 85% of your vsync FPS.
This is because of the mechanics of how vsync works— the only time that won't happen is if you have vsync Triple buffering enabled for your video card.

As far as I've seen and can guess, when the FPS drops from vsync kicking in, it will NOT DISPLAY on (at least SC2's built-in) the FPS counter display.

cmpcmp

84 Posts

March 23 2011 03:33 GMT

Yes, I am playing on the lowest possible setting with the exception of the resolution, but i really don't want to turn that down and not use the whole screen or make it look really shitty.

Vei

United States2845 Posts

March 23 2011 05:51 GMT

you can definitely get to master with horrible fps just on mechanics/good strategies, but if you want to break the "barrier" of like 3400 and get to upper masters i'd say you need like 90 fps... 60 fps feels choppy when scrolling the FoV.

Bear4188

United States1797 Posts

March 23 2011 06:19 GMT

#10

Most monitors are incapable of running beyond 60 Hz or so. Having a FPS higher than the monitor frame rate can lead to tearing, which is where you would then enable V-sync to avoid that (essentially an FPS cap). So if you have the hardware to handle it you should aim for your monitor's frame rate (probably 60 Hz), if your hardware can't handle that aim for around 30 FPS, which is where animate start to look smooth. I wouldn't recommend sacrificing resolution for frames if the slowing only happens on occasion, the resolution will always be beneficial.

Rider

Netherlands127 Posts

March 23 2011 06:31 GMT

#11

I think generally it's best to keep one's FPS above 40-ish. Anything below that and it'll start impacting your play given that the UI's responsiveness will start decreasing as well.

Personally I just drop the graphics detail to low/medium depending on what gives me a good solid framerate in the midgame. I might have to adjust if I'm going to be playing longer games though

Kammalleri

Canada613 Posts

March 23 2011 06:43 GMT

#12

Where can you see FPS? I'd love to see just how bad of a state I'm forced to play in lol

WniO

United States2706 Posts

March 23 2011 06:46 GMT

#13

im a 3200 masters with 60 fps on low... and xel nagas middle area is satan for my comp, i actually dont engage there ever lol

shire

United States405 Posts

March 23 2011 06:49 GMT

#14

don't go out on dates for few weeks, upgrade video card. seriously, girls can ruin ur game life.... i recently got radeon 5870 after breaking up with ex for few weeks.

Terranium

Turkmenistan144 Posts

March 23 2011 06:50 GMT

#15

If you know your opponent is running on low specs, just build a mothership, it'll be a free win. If you know what I mean.

Xapti

Canada2473 Posts

March 23 2011 06:51 GMT

#16

On March 23 2011 15:43 Kammalleri wrote:
Where can you see FPS? I'd love to see just how bad of a state I'm forced to play in lol

CTRL+ALT+F I think it is.
The issue I have with it is unlike virtually everything else in SC2's GUI it uses FIXED SIZE (pixel) font size, which makes it almost impossible to read at my resolution (1600x1200).
I saw on someone's stream the other day it was clearly visible, but he must have been on like 1024x768 or something

Intense

Australia50 Posts

March 23 2011 07:02 GMT

#17

If you're already running at the lowest resolution and still experiencing the low fps there's other small things you can do that might improve performance besides obviously upgrading. Make sure you don't have other programs running at the same time as SC2. Scan your comp with anti-virus and anti-spyware to make sure none of them are using system resources. De-frag and disk-cleanup.

When was the last time you did a complete re-install of windows? If it's been a while I'd suggest trying that, it's a good habit to do it once every 3-6 months esp if you have low specs to keep your comp running as best as it can.

pookychoo

New Zealand96 Posts

March 23 2011 07:04 GMT

#18

i would say that latency matters more than FPS for most people since the requirements for SC2 are pretty low. Although, if you live in the US you're probably getting good latency quite easily.

60fps is a good base fps

Runaground

Moldova36 Posts

March 23 2011 07:10 GMT

#19

Imo, fps should not be lower than 60 most of the time.
Back in the days, when I was playing wc3, I could feel difference between 64 (max wc3 fps) and 59 fps. And it really annoyed me.

WAAA

New Zealand291 Posts

March 23 2011 07:13 GMT

#20

On March 23 2011 16:10 Runaground wrote:
Imo, fps should not be lower than 60 most of the time.
Back in the days, when I was playing wc3, I could feel difference between 64 (max wc3 fps) and 59 fps. And it really annoyed me.

Are you such a whiny bitch that you imagine you can feel a difference between 64 and 59 fps?

As for a decent FPS in battles probably like 20 is enough, wouldnt want to play the whole game at 20 tho.

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