How to improve on SC2 performance? - Page 2

On November 20 2010 02:35 Kinslayer wrote:
SC2 is very heavy on the GPU yes. CPU can be a bottleneck, but that's if you have a pretty bad one.

Multi-core programming is just not that easy I am afraid. There aren't even that many tools that help you out with it. It is awesome for applications that are very parallel by nature like video processing, encoding, etc where many things can happen at the same time and don't need to wait for each other or depend on each other's results to move on. Games don't work that way very much.

This is why if you're buying a PC solely for gaming, things like hyperthreading and Quad core TODAY won't do much for you. Your game simply won't utilize that stuff. What it does give you though is the ability to run other stuff while your game is running without killing it too much.

Things that DO matter for gaming though are:

RAM, the more the better
GPU card - go for a very fast single card over a mediocre set of cards in SLI
Fast hard drive - 10K RPM or SSD

You'll get faster game performance if you say go with an i5 vs an i7 and use the money difference to upgrade one of these things instead.

On November 20 2010 03:48 leonardus wrote:
1.The games tells you to play on low, or it's your only option ?
2.How many frames do you have when you play on low (ctr+alt+f) ?

On November 20 2010 16:27 Tyler918273 wrote:
Also keep in mind that upgrading your graphics card is dependent on your psu. You have to make sure it can supply enough power to the new gpu. Other than that yes this game is very cpu dependent but an i3 shouldn't be too limiting as sc2 can only run on 2 cores anyway if I'm not mistaken. And as previously stated that ram should be fine if your not running background programs. Honestly tho a 5770 may be overkill if you just want to play smoothly on lower settings.

Edit: if you dont mind a little related thread hijack, I'm looking to get a new system soon and am curious what other people are running. I'm not looking for anything fancy, but if you are able to run super smooth on medium settings I would appreciate a spec summary for comparison to determine what I should get as far as an affordable system. Either way thanks. You could pm me if the hijack is not kosher.