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I have, both in the beta and now with release, been suffering from extended periods of extremely poor performance. The frame rate will be a few per second or even lower, becoming essentially unplayable. This happens without any apparent cause, though I have only observed it begin when opening SC2; it does not start while the game it running. If the game starts fine, it will run normally until I close it. I do not change my graphics settings from their usual mix of high and medium, as testing during the beta found that even setting everything to low had no impact on performance at these times. Resetting my computer has no impact, nor does restarting the game. Given that the beta and the release are different installs that doesn't seem to be the issue. It occurs whether in a 4v4 or 1v1, although additional slowdown is present when large armies come into play. There are no processes taking up an unusual amount of memory or processing power when it is running poorly, nor am I running any unusual programs.
I am running 64 bit Windows 7. I have 4 gigs of DDR2 ram, a 2.8 gighertz Intel core 2 extreme, and 2 GeForce 8700m GPUs with a total (I believe) of 512 megs GDDR3 DRAM. My laptop is a Dell XPS M1730. Speedfan hasn't shown any temperatures above 80C, and temperatures do not appear to differ when it is functionally normally versus when it is not.
I did just notice that SLI was set to be off, but that should result in lower overall performance, not the inconsistent performance I'm experiencing.
I'm completely at a loss at this point. Anyone have any clue?
Edit:
I ran a number of tests since creating the thread. First I ran SC2 on the last level and turned on god mode. Once the map maxed out on units at a save point I tried each graphics level from low to ultra. The resolution was 1920x1200 except for the low test, where it was 1024x768. Each time I changed the settings I reloaded to the same save point and alt-tabbed out to check the RAM and CPU usage, as well as the GPU temperatures. While the GPU temperatures did not change based on the settings, remaining at or below about 70C the entire time and, in fact, after I closed the game, the other two measures did according to Windows Task Manager. The game was lagging to an unplayable extent on all settings, although it was worse overall on the higher settings.
Settings Level: RAM usage (GB) / CPU load
Low: 2.53 / 56%
Medium: 2.69 / 57%
High: 2.79 / 60%
Ultra: 3.16 / 65%
The next day I ran some FPS tests after someone told me how to monitor that:
FPS with camera centered on action/Camera centered on fog of war
Low: 6/8
Medium: 5/8
High: 6/8
Ultra: 4/7
I also ran some FPS tests on the very beginning of the first level after someone recommended I vary the texture and graphics settings, with the camera centered where it starts and after all the triggers have played out so that nothing is really happening.
Texture Setting/Graphics Setting: FPS
Low/Ultra: 14
Ultra/Low: 57
Ultra/Medium: 27
High/Medium: 30
High/High: 19
When running through the settings one by one the biggest impacts were from shaders (predictably) and from terrain.
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With SLI enabled the problem is still present. I can tell when the game will lag like this when the stars on the sign-in screen stutter. When it is running normally they load smoothly.
Edit: I loaded a mission (Moebius Factor) to test the graphics settings again. There was a small improvement when running everything on low settings as compared to high, with Ultra predictably tanking everything. Low still runs quite poorly, a rough estimate of 5-10 FPS.
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sorry 
try updating drivers. sounds like a heat issue. that shit gets HOT. especially SLI. put a fan underneath your laptop, like a laptop fan. make sure it pulls hot air out though.
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FYI
iirc, Starcraft II doesn't have a FPS limiter, and some cards have been overheating because in the early game, when not much is going on, the GPU tries to render thousands of frames per second.
Not sure if the patch went in to fix it yet, but there is a temporary solution. Read this article. Also note, if your card is already fried/partially fried this wont help you.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/08/03/starcraft-2-doesn-t-limit-framerates/1
PS: I've posted this a few times to get the word out. I don't have posting privileges, could someone post this as a new thread? I didn't see this info when I searched the forums and I think people would like to know how to protect their GPU
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There have definitely been threads about the framerate cap to protect your GPU already, don't worry. But that's not the issue with mine. It has this issue regardless of the temperature, and the temperature is not any higher when I have the problem versus when I do not, nor does the problem worsen as far as I can tell as the temperature rises.
I updated my graphics driver after I first noticed the problem, and did so again last night. There is no change.
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do you use nview desktop manager? if so, turn it off and see if that fixes it. i had a really similar problem until i turned mine off... i have no idea why it would cause this problem either.
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On August 13 2010 00:25 Knightlax wrote:FYI iirc, Starcraft II doesn't have a FPS limiter, and some cards have been overheating because in the early game, when not much is going on, the GPU tries to render thousands of frames per second. Not sure if the patch went in to fix it yet, but there is a temporary solution. Read this article. Also note, if your card is already fried/partially fried this wont help you. http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2010/08/03/starcraft-2-doesn-t-limit-framerates/1PS: I've posted this a few times to get the word out. I don't have posting privileges, could someone post this as a new thread? I didn't see this info when I searched the forums and I think people would like to know how to protect their GPU
JESUS CHRIST WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP POSTING THAT. OP ALREADY SAID HIS TEMPERATURES WERE FINE. No adequately GPU would suffering from those problems in the first place and his problems occur IN GAME, not during the menu...
Two 8700Ms would hardly get to "thousands of frames per second", much less a hundred early game.
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On August 13 2010 09:06 Loser777 wrote:
JESUS CHRIST WILL YOU PEOPLE STOP POSTING THAT. OP ALREADY SAID HIS TEMPERATURES WERE FINE. No adequately GPU would suffering from those problems in the first place and his problems occur IN GAME, not during the menu...
Not quite, the menu will stutter slightly when loading, though for the most part runs normally. Loading screens also take much longer than usual I've noticed.
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Thanks for the effort, but that is an entirely different sort of lag. Mine is continuous low FPS, his was complete freezes every few seconds.
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Dropping my resolution down from 1920/1200 has resulted in a notable increase in performance, although still not to the level I achieve when I am not having this issue. The maximum temperatures I reached during gameplay were about 75C for my GPUs, and 47C for my CPUs.
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This is the topic you need:
http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=139647
We kind of managed to identify what is happening behind the curtains (the GPU usage suddenly drops to zero without any particular reason), but there's no known solution yet, unfortunately. I have kinda given up on it... I just live with it since nobody on the entire internet seems to have found a solution for this issue.
All I know is that it's definitely 100% NOT hardware-related, not due to an old/outdated system, not due to drivers, not due to overheating, not due to SLI and not due to other apps running in the background.
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All I know is that it's definitely 100% NOT hardware-related, not due to an old/outdated system, not due to drivers, not due to overheating, not due to SLI and not due to other apps running in the background.
If this is the case, I would recommend checking your settings then. I'm not totally sure on the power of the 8800m that the OP has, but with only 512MB of VRAM in SLI, then I would have to assume that neither card is very powerful. Try lowering your overall settings, and you also have a slightly outdated GPU as well, intel core 2 extremes CAN run SC2 well, but in general you need something a little beefy-er to get running on ultra.
Also consider your playability. If you are competitive, do you really need all the flashy bells and whistles that the game provides? It is one thing to up your graphics for the campaign and practice matches, but at least personally I don't like having a ton of little things to distract me while I play competitively. Definitely check out the thread on the Blizzard SC2 forums about the Variables.txt file and the things you can do to modify the ultra settings to run much better. (thread can be found here: http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/375107634)
Besides that, run some benchmarks on your system and post the results here. I think you might be over-estimating the power of what sounds to be a 3-4 year old system.
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Dude, I already said 10 times in the previous topic that it is NOT related to outdated hardware. The system in the OP is not mine, I bought a new PC to play the game and it still has issues even on medium. My CPU and GPU are only utilized for about 20-30% by SC2, yet I have extreme FPS drops.
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I think I experienced similar lags in long games against comps (the vs Insane etc Achievements, turtling into BCs). Occasionally I would get 0/1 fps for an extended period of time, usually a few minutes after leaving my base and wrecking zergs.
One might assume that it's because of all the units and sprites and stuff, but I can play fine with 20 BCs attacking 40 Corruptors with 200 lings running around. "fine" meaning that the frame rate drops to 10 or so, but it still runs "smoothly". Then the unit numbers decrease after a few battles, and frame rate goes back to a constant 30-40. Then suddenly the frame rate drops to 1, stays like that for quite a while despite the much lower unit count and action on the map. Then it miraculously goes back to 30-40 after 10-20 minutes.
I don't really know what this is all about. I suspect some horrible coding in SC2. Some sort of broken algorithms or semi-memory leaks that get caught later on or whatever. I would look into the particle engine first, but that's just a shot into the blue (since it looks like BCs use a lot of particles and it usually starts after I attacked with BCs for some time).
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On August 14 2010 00:11 Raveler wrote:This is the topic you need: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=139647We kind of managed to identify what is happening behind the curtains (the GPU usage suddenly drops to zero without any particular reason), but there's no known solution yet, unfortunately. I have kinda given up on it... I just live with it since nobody on the entire internet seems to have found a solution for this issue. All I know is that it's definitely 100% NOT hardware-related, not due to an old/outdated system, not due to drivers, not due to overheating, not due to SLI and not due to other apps running in the background.
That says 5-10 seconds at a time, this is hours at a time. Seemingly different.
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On August 14 2010 00:53 Chronald wrote:Show nested quote +All I know is that it's definitely 100% NOT hardware-related, not due to an old/outdated system, not due to drivers, not due to overheating, not due to SLI and not due to other apps running in the background. If this is the case, I would recommend checking your settings then. I'm not totally sure on the power of the 8800m that the OP has, but with only 512MB of VRAM in SLI, then I would have to assume that neither card is very powerful. Try lowering your overall settings, and you also have a slightly outdated GPU as well, intel core 2 extremes CAN run SC2 well, but in general you need something a little beefy-er to get running on ultra. Besides that, run some benchmarks on your system and post the results here. I think you might be over-estimating the power of what sounds to be a 3-4 year old system.
I'm running on medium/high usually, but on low the problem is still present. I only tried Ultra once to see how strongly flavored the fail was.
What would be a good benchmark program? I downloaded something called SandraLite, but to be honest I don't know what most of the stuff it says means.
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I ran a bunch of benchmarks with SandraLite, but I really don't know what I'm looking for in them. The report I got back is about a thousand pages long (11.3 megabytes for a freaking .txt file), so I should at least have any information I need in there if someone knows what to look at. The Processor Multi-Media test result is below, it sounded relevant.
+ Show Spoiler +<<< Processor Multi-Media >>>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
< Benchmark Results >
Aggregate Multi-Media Performa:11.46MPixel/s
Multi-Media Integer x16 iSSE4.:13.69MPixel/s
Multi-Media Float x8 iSSE2: 9.22MPixel/s
Multi-Media Double x4 iSSE2: 4.75MPixel/s
Results Interpretation: Higher scores are better.
< Windows Experience Index >
Current Processor(s): 6.4
Results Interpretation: Higher scores are better.
< Performance vs. Speed >
Aggregate Multi-Media Performa:4.10kPixels/s/MHz
Multi-Media Integer x16 iSSE4.:4.90kPixels/s/MHz
Multi-Media Float x8 iSSE2: 3.30kPixels/s/MHz
Multi-Media Double x4 iSSE2: 1.70kPixels/s/MHz
Results Interpretation: Higher scores are better.
< Performance vs. Power >
Processor(s) Power: 28.42W
Aggregate Multi-Media Performa:403.13kPixels/s/W
Multi-Media Integer x16 iSSE4.:481.70kPixels/s/W
Multi-Media Float x8 iSSE2: 324.56kPixels/s/W
Multi-Media Double x4 iSSE2: 166.96kPixels/s/W
Results Interpretation: Higher scores are better.
< Performance Test Status >
Result ID: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9000 @
2.80GHz (2C, 2.8GHz, 6MB L2, 2.8GHz FSB 249%
OC)
Platform Compliance: x64
NUMA Support: No
SMP (Multi-Processor) Benchmar:Yes
Total Test Threads: 2
Multi-Core Test: Yes
Cores per Processor: 2
SMT (Multi-Threaded) Benchmark:No
Processor Affinity: P0C0T0 P0C1T0
System Timer: 2.73MHz
Rendered Image Size: 1920x1080
< Processor >
Model: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Extreme CPU X9000 @
2.80GHz
Speed: 2.8GHz
Peak Processing Performance (P:22.34GFLOPS
Adjusted Peak Performance (APP:6.7WG
Cores per Processor: 2 Unit(s)
Type: Mobile, Dual-Core
Integrated Data Cache: 2x 32kB, Synchronous, Write-Thru, 8-way, 64
byte line size
L2 On-board Cache: 6MB, ECC, Synchronous, ATC, 24-way, 64 byte
line size, 2 threads sharing
< Features >
SSE Technology: Yes
SSE2 Technology: Yes
SSE3 Technology: Yes
Supplemental SSE3 Technology: Yes
SSE4.1 Technology: Yes
SSE4.2 Technology: No
AVX - Advanced Vector eXtensio:No
FMA - Fused Multiply/Add eXten:No
SSE4A Technology: No
FMA4 - 4 Operands Fused Multip:No
HTT - Hyper-Threading Technolo:No
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More tests, this time a little more straightforward. I ran SC2 on the last level and turned on god mode. Once the map maxed out on units at a save point I tried each graphics level from low to ultra. The resolution was 1920x1200 except for the low test, where it was 1024x768. Each time I changed the settings I reloaded to the same save point and alt-tabbed out to check the RAM and CPU usage, as well as the GPU temperatures. While the GPU temperatures did not change based on the settings, remaining at or below about 70C the entire time and, in fact, after I closed the game, the other two measures did according to Windows Task Manager. The game was lagging to an unplayable extent on all settings, although it was worse overall on the higher settings.
Settings Level: RAM usage (GB) / CPU load
Low: 2.53 / 56%
Medium: 2.69 / 57%
High: 2.79 / 60%
Ultra: 3.16 / 65%
It would appear then that if my problem is a hardware bottleneck, though I suspect it is not, it is neither in the RAM or the CPU. I also tried overclocking my CPU separately from these test with no noticeable change in performance.
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A couple of possibilities:
1. You may have the texture settings too high. Although your GPUs have a total of 512MB RAM, that's only 256MB per card, so you should be using Medium and you may need to use Low. If the texture settings are too high for the VRAM, performance will drop off spectacularly. It's likely to be map-dependent.
2. Your GPU(s) may be sticking in 2D mode due to a driver/BIOS bug or throttling down due to temperature. nVidia cards of this era have a nasty habit of dying suddenly beyond 70C so it wouldn't be surprising if Dell crippled the cards to reduce the return rate. Clearing out the heatsinks (they routinely become blocked with dust after a few years) and disabling (preferably removing) one of the cards may help.
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EPT
