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Instead of utilizing what multitasking skills I have to become better at SC2, I prefer to use them to watch SC2 streams while playing. The problem is that when watching a stream, the FPS alnd responsiveness of SC2 suffers. I realize that the more you run at the same time, the less resources remain for SC2, but the performance hit seems to be excessive. I don't get nearly as bad a drop in FPS when streaming for example.
Anyway, I run on Win7 with a Phenom II X4 955 (okay, officially it's a X2 555, but I magic'ed it up a bit), 4 GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5670. Not really top-end hardware, but it gets the job done. With my settings (custom, between medium and high for most things) I get around 30~40 FPS at 1920x1080, playing in windowed-fullscreen. When I open up a stream on my second monitor, this drops to 20 (or less sometimes) and the controls in general start to feel sluggish.
Now, I tried several things to diagnose and remedy the problem:
- Turn hardware acceleration on and off in the flash-player, no changes.
- Set the process-priority of the flash-player to "below normal", no changes.
- Set processor affinity so that SC2 runs on cores 1 and 2, while the flash player only gets to use core 3 (and/or 4), no changes.
The problem occurs even at the very lowest of stream settings (240p). In fact, a few days ago, I opened a Lo3 stream, set it to the lowest quality setting, switched to a different tab in Firefox, kept Firefox om my main monitor and swapped into SC2. So the stream was completely in the background and not visible as I was only listening to it. And still my SC2 performance was poor.
Are there any obvious fixes I've missed? Some tweaks to the Flash player to improve performance? Some SC2 settings? Or is it just hopeless and should I accept the situation until I upgrade my machine?
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Try another browser for the streams. If it's memory leaking or something of that kind it might help.
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had same problem using firefox, switched to google chrome, never gone back, love it. Google chrome also makes the transition really easy, all my bookmarks + favourites were transferred over.
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try playin on lowest settings. if its still to slow do some overclocking! yeahrrr!
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@gruff, I don't think it's a memory leak. Memory leaks should cause lots of swapping action on the harddisk. I don't hear any additional harddisk activity nor does my memory appear to be full when checking the Task Manager. SC2 is the biggest RAM user, Firefox and the flash-player are decent memory-users as well, but it all fits quite well in my 4 GB (usually have ~1 GB free).
@Scvhero, lowering settings and/or overclocking is an option, but it only treats the symptoms rather than the underlying cause. I don't feel that my framerate should drop as much as it does when watching a low-quality flash stream.
I'll try another browser tonight, already have Chrome installed from IPL3 when they're player didn't play nice with FF7.
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It has to do with hardware acceleration in Windows 7. I have the same problem with my HD 5850 that whenever anything flash (stream/video) is open, my card underclocks itself. I don't think it's possible to completely disable hardware acceleration in Win7, at least I can't seem to.
Edit: After looking into it more, it seems to be a problem with ati cards and flash 11. The card prioritizes the "media clock speed" over anything else so it downclocks any time flash video is playing. The only way to fix it looks to be flashing the GPU's BIOS.
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On November 12 2011 01:49 Jophess wrote:
It has to do with hardware acceleration in Windows 7. I have the same problem with my HD 5850 that whenever anything flash (stream/video) is open, my card underclocks itself. I don't think it's possible to completely disable hardware acceleration in Win7, at least I can't seem to.
Edit: After looking into it more, it seems to be a problem with ati cards and flash 11. The card prioritizes the "media clock speed" over anything else so it downclocks any time flash video is playing. The only way to fix it looks to be flashing the GPU's BIOS.
Oh, that sounds incredibly stupid. I'll try looking for a way to disable power management features on the card all together and keep it running at maximum speed all the time.
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On November 12 2011 03:01 Rannasha wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2011 01:49 Jophess wrote:
It has to do with hardware acceleration in Windows 7. I have the same problem with my HD 5850 that whenever anything flash (stream/video) is open, my card underclocks itself. I don't think it's possible to completely disable hardware acceleration in Win7, at least I can't seem to.
Edit: After looking into it more, it seems to be a problem with ati cards and flash 11. The card prioritizes the "media clock speed" over anything else so it downclocks any time flash video is playing. The only way to fix it looks to be flashing the GPU's BIOS. Oh, that sounds incredibly stupid. I'll try looking for a way to disable power management features on the card all together and keep it running at maximum speed all the time.
It's a problem in the card's BIOS, so I don't think there's a way to change it without manually changing and flashing the BIOS.
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I am experiencing the same problem, this was the case with the earlier versions of Flash too.
As jophess said, it might be a problem with ATI card's UVD clocks jumping in front of the high performance clock profile. It is weird tho that this doesn't affect the other games i play.
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Firefox have a problem of drawing via setting gfx.direct2d.disabled. Go to about:config, find (or create) it and set it to true. I'm not saying this is the cause, but a lot of drawing issues (and UI glitches) dissapeared on my Windows 7 64-bit after this.
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I think your "normal" frame rate there may be low. Try running SC2 with HWMonitor running in the background and check CPU core max temps afterwards. Also try reverting your CPU to the stock core count.
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On November 12 2011 01:49 Jophess wrote:
It has to do with hardware acceleration in Windows 7. I have the same problem with my HD 5850 that whenever anything flash (stream/video) is open, my card underclocks itself. I don't think it's possible to completely disable hardware acceleration in Win7, at least I can't seem to.
Edit: After looking into it more, it seems to be a problem with ati cards and flash 11. The card prioritizes the "media clock speed" over anything else so it downclocks any time flash video is playing. The only way to fix it looks to be flashing the GPU's BIOS.
Simply disabling hardware acceleration in Flash's settings (Right click stream window - Settings) helped me.
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On November 12 2011 22:08 Sturmis wrote:Show nested quote +On November 12 2011 01:49 Jophess wrote:
It has to do with hardware acceleration in Windows 7. I have the same problem with my HD 5850 that whenever anything flash (stream/video) is open, my card underclocks itself. I don't think it's possible to completely disable hardware acceleration in Win7, at least I can't seem to.
Edit: After looking into it more, it seems to be a problem with ati cards and flash 11. The card prioritizes the "media clock speed" over anything else so it downclocks any time flash video is playing. The only way to fix it looks to be flashing the GPU's BIOS. Simply disabling hardware acceleration in Flash's settings (Right click stream window - Settings) helped me.
I had done that multiple times and it didn't do anything. There's a known issue with HD 4xxx, 5xxx, and 6xxx cards that prioritize UVD clock speeds over standard clock speeds, resulting in the downclocking. The only thing that prevented my GPU from downclocking itself was to set the UVD clock speed to the same clock speed I normally use. (Requires flashing the GPU's BIOS and voids warranty, do at your own risk.)
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On November 13 2011 02:12 Jophess wrote:
I had done that multiple times and it didn't do anything. There's a known issue with HD 4xxx, 5xxx, and 6xxx cards that prioritize UVD clock speeds over standard clock speeds, resulting in the downclocking. The only thing that prevented my GPU from downclocking itself was to set the UVD clock speed to the same clock speed I normally use. (Requires flashing the GPU's BIOS and voids warranty, do at your own risk.)
They didn't fix this for the 6xxx series? Do you know if they're intending to fix this for the 7xxx series coming out early 2012?
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On November 13 2011 02:12 Jophess wrote:
There's a known issue with HD 4xxx, 5xxx, and 6xxx cards that prioritize UVD clock speeds over standard clock speeds, resulting in the downclocking.
Just want to point out, it's not a problem for all ATI 4-5-6xxx cards 
It's not affecting my HD5870, nor my two friends' HD5850 though (all from different manufacturers).
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I contacted AMD tech support regarding this issue. It took them a while, but they got back to me with this:
AMD Engineering is aware of this issue, the workaround is to not play video while gaming to avoid any decrease in performance running the two applications together causes.
I guess it's Nvidia for me for my next graphics card. Nice how AMD advertises their multi-monitor solutions for their cards while you can't even use it properly ^^.
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EPT
