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asdf3455
23 Posts
I have e8400 overclocked to 3.6Ghz, which unfortunately drops to 40fps in some lategame situations. I think it started to do that only after patch 1.5.3, but that doesn't matter. PS: GPU (AMD 6770) is not an issue, since mininum fps is identical on low and high details. Also I am aware that I will have to buy new motherboard. | ||
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theBlues
El Salvador638 Posts
On November 29 2012 21:17 asdf3455 wrote: What CPU can can handle Starcraft 2 at 60fps even during 200 vs 200 food battles? (on low settings) Since I have desktop only to play Starcraft, I want to spend as little as possible. I guess that 2500K and above will run it fine, but what about i3-3220, Pentium G2120 or even G860? I prefer personal experience, not approximations, thank you. I have e8400 overclocked to 3.6Ghz, which unfortunately drops to 40fps in some lategame situations. I think it started to do that only after patch 1.5.3, but that doesn't matter. PS: GPU (AMD 6770) is not an issue, since mininum fps is identical on low and high details. Also I am aware that I will have to buy new motherboard. It seems very odd that you are getting low frames in 200 200 battles with that CPU (low), I would first format the crap out of the PC and Clean the hell out of the Hardware, you might be having a heating issue. I currently have an ATHLON II x4 and core for core you cpu is a lot faster and has more cache. I get fluid battles in various settings. | ||
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kill619
United States212 Posts
So I'd have to assume that anything as good or better than the i5 2500k should be exactly what your looking for, at least as far as intel processors go. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
If you want best performance, you cant really settle for anything less than a heavily overclocked 2500k/3570k, and you are not going to get better than 20-25fps minimums and like 40 or so average in an endgame PvZ battle with a ton of brood lords, IT's, storms, cloaking field etc. Anything else will have progressively worse performance, and large team games will bring any CPU to a crawl even without a battle happening if it goes to 800v800 supply. | ||
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Fragile51
Netherlands15767 Posts
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
The basics: SC2 can only utilize two cores, but it places heavy demands on those cores. Fastest per-core performance is the crucial performance benchmark. GPU & graphics settings in general have next-to-no influence on performance, unless you have no video card at all and are using integrated graphics. Which just makes you lower settings. The breakdown: Best of the best: i5-3570k or i7-3770k, overclocked. Newest, fastest Intel architecture. There's no difference between the i5 & i7 for SC2 purposes (except, of course, the i5 is $100 less expensive). Overclock heavily for a significant performance boost. This is as good as it gets - and your performance will be excellent. FPS will drop below 60 in extreme late-game scenarios, but this isn't actually all that noticeable: you should still experience smooth & reliable performance. A notch below: i5-2500k or i7-2600k overclocked Last year's newest, fastest Intel architecture. Only a touch slower than the i5-3570k & if you're really ambitious it is somewhat easier to overclock to nosebleed speeds. 2nd-tier Intel options: non-overclocked desktop i5s & i7s, meaning i5-2400, i5-3470, i7-2600, etc. This is as good as it gets without the performance boost of overclocking. These processors still have sufficient oomph that you can play 1v1 with no noticeable performance loss. (Basis of claim: EG.SuppyRC has one of these, and under normal circumstances is very happy with their performance. However, he mentioned that when streaming he suffered choppy in-game performance related to the extra CPU demands.) 3rd-tier Intel options: the dual-core processors. Current gen: i3-3220, pentium g2120. Last gen (just a touch difference between them, like the i5-3570k & i5-2500k): i3-2100, pentium g860. These have the same core speed as the 2nd-tier (quad-core) Intel options, so you'd assume these would perform as well as the 2nd-tier Intel options, but benchmarks show otherwise. They're a step behind, because of less L3 cache, I'm told. That said, they're still solid performers, especially for the 1v1 scene. Personal experience: I own & use a Pentium g850. 200/200 battles will slow down to 25-30ish FPS. In real-world terms that's a very small degradation in graphics prettiness, but you can still micro your armies with no hiccups. 2v2s are also usually fine. In 3v3s & 4v4s late game, you're still going to have some noticeable slowdowns. But it'll be at least playable. (Real world example: storm is harder to aim but still quite useful.) Long story short, if you're getting 40fps in your late-game scenarios (race you play & typical composition makes a big difference in personal experience), you're doing fine. Minimal improvements will take considerable $ (~$330 for a i5-3570k + overclocking mobo, assuming you can re-use your current heatsink. If your performance isn't affecting your unit control/distracting you when the FPS meter is turned OFF, then consider it sufficient and move on. If you're really fanatical about squeezing those last few FPS #s out of the game, then open the checkbook. But throwing money at the problem won't guarantee you 60fps. | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
Great post though. | ||
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Special Endrey
Germany1929 Posts
i mean for me its on another level, i had a ati 5870 - was awesome - now i have a gtx680, well i have not found a game yet to make her work on 100%. still when i used my old 8800 gts, nvidia - i had similar framerates with a way older graphics card | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
You shouldn't feel any lag at all on an i7 Its not about added input lag as much as raw framerate hits in terms of capturing the screen for streaming.Ive done some benches recently on a 950 @4ghz, and while i get over 300fps idle looking at base, adding xsplit/OBS screen capture takes that to 170 or so. Normal gamesource to 110. Performance drops similarly throughout the replay and with gamesource i got a minimum of 35fps, screen cap minimums barely above 60, but this was on a 12 minute pvp 1v1 replay, nothing more. Sandy/Ivy Bridge enjoys a massive performance advantage that will inflate framerates a lot, and there's some new stuff that helps performance a lot more, but framerates are still cut massively with any kind of capture. I havn't seen anything take less than a third of your FPS. You may be at 40fps minimums without capturing, but when you lose a third of your framerate from that it really really hurts, and almost all capture methods would almost cut framerate in half for me. You dont just have a magical tier where your CPU becomes X strengh and suddenly game performance stops being impacted. All that really happens is that your CPU is powerful enough to inflate the original framerate so much that even after it is cut heavily by the resources required to capture screen, it is still high enough for your needs, or to not notice it being hurt so much. In terms of non streaming/capturing performance, 2500k/3570k is king. 2500k is the better overclocker, often to the point where it can overtake the 3570k in performance, but whatever you do you will be cut down to ~40fps minimums at best with some split-second drops in 1v1 with current consumer CPU's, anybody who says otherwise does not measure correctly, is victim of the placebo effect or is talking out of their ass nvidia cards work way better with sc2 than ati i mean for me its on another level, i had a ati 5870 - was awesome - now i have a gtx680, well i have not found a game yet to make her work on 100%. 5870 is not on the same performance tier as 680, thats like saying you had a box of matchsticks that you used to cook bread with but your new toaster is so much better. It is expected to be far more powerful. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/511?vs=555 Anandtech bench's seem to show 680 having inflated performance in sc2 relative to other games vs the 5870, though - but they are running it with driver forced 4xMSAA, which would heavily influence the results, might be hitting VRAM limits because of it on the 5870 but not the 680, or having other performance implications that you might not normally hit, because nobody uses forced 4xMSAA unless they want a blurry UI and game because it's not properly supported in the engine | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
Phenom ii is comparable to a Pentium G860 in price and performance, not a G2120 or SB-i3 (unless overclocked), and nowhere near ib-i3 or i5/i7 of any generation. It was made to compete with the Core2 architecture, not iCore. For someone looking to stream on a budget, it's a good place to look at. The OP sounds like he has enough money to go for an i5 though, but he did say he wanted budget. Phenom II is basically a Pentium in game performance, but it's awesome at h264 codec pass, which is what xsplit/ffsplit/obs all do, and a pentium/phenom/i3 will all handle any modern game and any game coming out soon pretty well. Obviously i5 is king, but you don't exactly tell everyone to buy a lamborghini, you tell people to buy a civic. Or a pick-up truck for your specific purpose. Think of the phenom as a pick up truck, or minivan, for streaming, and just like a lambo, it'll drive around (game). | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
Also no one cares about average FPS. Especially in SC2 because who cares about 300 FPS looking down at 12 workers. Well math does. We only talk about minimums because minimums happen when there are big confrontations which happens to be when a lot of micro needs to happen which is when FPS is important. | ||
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sechkie
United States334 Posts
I read a post comparing it to an underclocked 2600k is that accurate? | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
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Belha
Italy2850 Posts
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sechkie
United States334 Posts
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IPS.Blue
Germany309 Posts
On November 29 2012 23:28 MisterFred wrote:But throwing money at the problem won't guarantee you 60fps. So how many years for throwing money getting you to 120 FPS min -_-? Blizzard should really add support for more than two cores ... | ||
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Psychobabas
2531 Posts
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
Remember when everyone said "intel is stronger but AMD phenom/athlon is definitely the way to go, in the future everyone is going to be using more cores!" Man they couldn't have been more wrong. The idea of buying for the future is so stupid. | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
On November 30 2012 22:51 Belial88 wrote: I asked blizzard about this at blizzcon, if hots would be optimized for more cores. I got a typical blizzard response but it did not sound like they were doing so. Remember when everyone said "intel is stronger but AMD phenom/athlon is definitely the way to go, in the future everyone is going to be using more cores!" Man they couldn't have been more wrong. The idea of buying for the future is so stupid. I'm not a programmer, but apparently this isn't as easy as it sounds. Even some games that theoretically can use four cores really only rely on one (Skyrim). And in any case, Blizzard will probably never make games complex enough to need four good cores until quad-core processors are the market standard, which doesn't seem to be any time soon. Same reason their games never require much graphics oomph: they want to sell to people with crappy computers. And yeah, the idea of buying for the future is stupid. | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
With the multi-core thing, we were expected to be able to inline cores so that two cores can operate one thread at double speed, but that technology has not been invented yet, dynamically sharing resources between cores I think is the big hurdle. | ||
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Franthier
China64 Posts
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
On December 01 2012 06:34 Franthier wrote: Are you just strictly relying on the built in GPU of CPU? You need a standalone video card to help you boost FPS. He has a 6770, which is just at the point where you can play on ultra (max) graphics settings with pretty much no performance penalty. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
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cari-kira
Germany655 Posts
people tend to tab out of a game and surf the net, chat, skype and listen to music, and theres a operating system, virus scanner and things like that, too. so im happily giving sc2 2 full cores and have 2 for the rest. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
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cari-kira
Germany655 Posts
On December 01 2012 07:30 Cyro wrote: SC2 can see quite a bit of benefit on minimum FPS from a third core AFAIK, but does not rely heavily on it at all in terms of usage, and doesn't benefit at all from a fourth core on a powerful CPU thats of course when nothing else is running on the computer. back in the times, when you had to close every task that was eating memory and cpu? no, thanks. and yes, sc2 has 10-20% more fps on 3 cores compared to 2 cores. | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
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god_forbids
United States111 Posts
I know that SC2 is optimized for dual core - and I think that's cuz the game's a little old, the design's been going on for a long time - I was wondering if HotS is gonna be optimized for tri-core or quad-core? Lead Software Engineer, Graphics Dominic Filione said: We actually didn't specifically target dual core, it's just that happened to be how it balanced out. And there's actually more than two cores [being used] but, yeah, the third and the fourth one are actually very low. [Engine design] is a constant process, it's not necessarily just going to be Swarm, WoL we're gonna patch it up and as we make performance upgrades WoL will get the same thing. The answer is YES, we're gonna target more cores as- we just need to re-code some of the engine to take advantage of that. Very Blizzard answer. Who knows when they plan to "re-code some of the engine." May not even be HotS 1.0. In any case, when it finally happens it will be a free performance upgrade for everyone and the OP's scenario might become possible. | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
On December 01 2012 07:49 Medrea wrote: SC2 doesnt use the third core, everything else thats not SC2 gets dumped on it and thats why you see the performances increase. Do people really do that though? Im pretty picky about that, and i run 0% CPU usage starting at desktop with almost no other processes and under 900mb RAM used from boot on Windows 7, i remember increases of like 30+% on minimum FPS between 2 and 3 core in 1-2 benchmarks, its a pretty big deal if enough CPU resources are being used to affect framerate mins that much | ||
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MisterFred
United States2033 Posts
So it might not actually be those "other" system demands going onto the third core that provides the benefit. | ||
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
On December 01 2012 08:01 god_forbids wrote: At Blizzcon 2011 Art & Technology Panel (VIDEO LINK at 42:35), Belial88(?) said: Lead Software Engineer, Graphics Dominic Filione said: Very Blizzard answer. Who knows when they plan to "re-code some of the engine." May not even be HotS 1.0. In any case, when it finally happens it will be a free performance upgrade for everyone and the OP's scenario might become possible. You know he said that, but that's bs. The usage of the third and fourth cores is only background applications and the operating system being offloaded onto the 3rd and 4th core because the application in question, SC2, is only optimized for dualcore and is hogging all of the first 2 cores. Hence why you'll see benchmarks say "game X is optimized for dualcore, but you can see there is a slight gain in performance with a third and fourth core!". Not really, what you are seeing is the OS and background apps move over. An i7 locked to 2 cores is going to perform SC2 a million times better than a phenom hexacore, and if you ran nothing in the background and had a very unintrusive OS, that phenom x6 would not perform any better than an x2. And nothing has been done for WOL, and it doesn't appear HOTS has been threaded any better. And to think people said you should buy AMD x4/x6 because 'very soon games and software is going to be optimized for more cores and they'll be more future proof than intel!'. Software isn't going true quadcore or hexacore annytime soon, dualcore is going to stay for a long time. Even BF3 is just dualcore. Well if you look at benchmarks for SC2, the quad-core i5-3450 or i5-2400 do better than the i3-3220 or i3-2100, which doesn't make much sense if the game only uses two cores. But I always heard it wasn't the non-SC2 stuff being offloaded to the third core, but rather the larger L3 cache available on the processor. So it might not actually be those "other" system demands going onto the third core that provides the benefit. Core i5 has better architecture and a better IMC (which SC2 greatly appreciates), you have a locked i5 dualcore it's going to outperform a comparable i3. The performance gain of tri/quad cores over dualcore for gaming/sc2 is because of background applications and the OS getting off the first and 2nd cores. SC2 itself gains nothing from third and fourth core (that's why you see a very flat,small, and identical increase from dual to tri as tri to quad). Your system gains from more cores. Set core affinity to background applications to the unused cores by SC2, then set sc2 priority to above normal. | ||
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skyR
Canada13817 Posts
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Medrea
10003 Posts
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Rollin
Australia1552 Posts
On December 01 2012 15:02 skyR wrote: i5 does not have better architecture, what do you smoke? I think he means it has more cache and is allowed to turbo-boost, which apparently constitutes calling it an entirely different architecture, even though it's the same architecture. | ||
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covetousrat
2109 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
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Belial88
United States5217 Posts
SC2 uses whichever core is available that wants to pick up the process. You shouldnt manually divert resources anywhere with affinities. It does not, it uses 2 cores. I did not say it always uses core 0 and 1, or something to that affect. I think he means it has more cache and is allowed to turbo-boost, which apparently constitutes calling it an entirely different architecture, even though it's the same architecture. yea architecture wasnt the right choice of words there, and i was thinking ib5 vs sb3. | ||
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Hwotk
32 Posts
not only is the stream super HQ but the game runs just as i would like it to at home on at leasth high/ultra settings from i can tell by the looks of the game the computers used by GD studio as far as i know are asus rog's i want to get one used to stream this but its hard to get in uk | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
There's no secret, you just need to make the game perform well with any CPU that can handle basic encoding workloads (720p60, 1080p30) unless you want to have more extreme settings that nobody really does, 2500k/3570k/2600k/3770k give the strongest game performance and are not even close to being capped usage-wise | ||
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Gentso
United States2218 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
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Hokay
United States738 Posts
On December 02 2012 03:38 Gentso wrote: The biggest upgrade for me in this game was going from an HDD to an SSD. It actually increased my FPS, which I didn't think it'd do. I run i5 3570k at 4.5ghz and with the HDD I was running SC2 max settings at 70fps starting and 30s during intensive battles. It also had big stutters in the first game. With the SSD it's 90-100 fps to start off and 50 during intensive battles, and smooth as silk from the first time I play. If this is true than I might have to but an SSD lol. Can anyone else chime in on SSDs? I thought it would just effect load times. edit: nm just read the above post :X | ||
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Gentso
United States2218 Posts
On December 02 2012 03:42 Cyro wrote: It cant improve your FPS, only lessen stutters etc due to loading assets if you didnt run the preloader or something. Its just placebo effect I've tested this, man. I've reformated my comp with HDD, loaded up only fresh drivers and SC2 on my comp and played SC2 and had 30-70 FPS. Got the SDD and did the same exact thing and it increased FPS by around 20. Same procedure too. I load up Ohana and put the ingame FPS meter on, and it's instantly 20 FPS difference. I play against computer, get a 200 army and push enemy and check FPS during this time, too. Same comp, same drivers, and same freshly formatted drive and windows install. | ||
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Medrea
10003 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20285 Posts
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asdf3455
23 Posts
On December 02 2012 04:27 Gentso wrote: I've tested this, man. I've reformated my comp with HDD, loaded up only fresh drivers and SC2 on my comp and played SC2 and had 30-70 FPS. Got the SDD and did the same exact thing and it increased FPS by around 20. Same procedure too. I load up Ohana and put the ingame FPS meter on, and it's instantly 20 FPS difference. I play against computer, get a 200 army and push enemy and check FPS during this time, too. Same comp, same drivers, and same freshly formatted drive and windows install. Seems legit. If you want to really test it, clone your SSD on HDD (for example with Acronis Trueimage) and compare FPS at some point in a replay. | ||
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