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Hey everyone, I have a question about resolution and its affects on my FPS.
So I have a laptop that is a year old, and it use to run SC2 on medium no problem. I could fraps games and play no problem. Then over the summer I purchased an external monitor. 23 inch or so, 1080p. I continued using my laptop monitor to play/fraps Starcraft. Now I am using my external monitor as my main monitor for everything and I have having a lot of fps issues.
So some interesting things to note is that when I am at medium settings and 1920x1080p, I get around 15 to 17 fps in menu... maybe 21 to 24 Fullscreen mode. When I go low settings I can bump it up to 26 to 29. (Not even 30. Extremely disappointing.)
When I move the resolution to 1280x720 it shoots up to 45 to 50. Which is great, but it looks TERRIBLE. Like absolutely horrible even on medium.
So what is causing this and what can I do to fix it. I am fine playing the game on low, but I want 1080p and 30 fps minimum. Frapsing I'd like to continue on medium settings like I have been on the past.
Any ideas?
Thanks.
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I'll also note that my laptop is about 17 inches, and its resolution is 1366x768. Starcraft looked fine on it.
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Because your GPU has a million more pixels to render...
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Well, you are playing at a much higher resolution than the internals of the laptop were spec'd for, so that's one reason. It's pretty straightforward actually, there's nothing out of the ordinary. (I think my terminology may be really off here, but it's the idea that matters). Larger resolution, more pixels to process. 1920*1080 > 1366*768. Tons more pixels, more power is needed to process all the pixels, all the time. That's the first thing. Second, Fraps, as you know, is a CPU-eating monster.
I used to use Fraps all the time, when I did game review stuff, and it's really intensive on your CPU. Paired with the fact that SC2 is heavily CPU-based, you're trying to get too much out of your CPU. If you have quad core, set the affinity of Fraps to 2 cores, and SC2 to the other two cores, that should help.
In short, there's nothing you can do to fix it, besides investing in a new laptop as far as I'm concerned. Sure, you may get some minimal gains by setting your laptop to performance mode, updating drivers, reformat/reinstalling everything, but you're asking for too much out of your laptop.
+ Show Spoiler +What's causing it?
Resolution too OP for your CPU.
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I see. This makes sense. I also feel like these things have gotten worse over time, which is odd. I think I'll try and use my laptop for Fraps. Just go back to the old formula.
I plan on building a computer next year so this problem will go away, I was just hoping there would be some sort of fix for the mean time. Haha.
How do you set the affinity of programs on your CPU?
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Well, patch 1.5.x was a little weird on performance, so that might be one answer to that. Also, component degradation?
You can set affinity in task manager. Find the process, right click on it, and then press "Set Affinity."
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Yeah. 1.5 screwed people over a lot worse than it did me. But it certainly didn't help me. And I thought about component degradation too. Eh what can you do.
Thanks for all the help.
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Also try running the "Unit Preloader" map (search the Arcade map pool), it helps greatly on my laptop which has limited CPU to show for 
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Yeah I do that. It does help a bit.
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Full HD has 2.25 times the amout of pixels than "normal HD" (1280x720)...
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My nigga, whats the specs of your laptop? You can get a general idea of whats going on by telling us the symptoms, but you won't get a direct answer without posting the specs of your laptop. Considering that you are using 1366x768, I think it's safe to assume that you're on an IGP (if you bought it a year ago, its probably a lower end SB IGP), so thats part of the reason why you can't run on a higher resolution.
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On December 03 2012 06:27 Cadoink wrote:
How do you set the affinity of programs on your CPU?
Open the task manager and right click the process you want to tweak.
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Just curious, did you try switching to Fullscreen (windowed)? Surprisingly, when patch 1.5 came out my fullscreen got all blurry and just changing it to windowed fullscreen actually improved the quality.
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Well of course you would get less performance on higher resolution.
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Of course it looks horrible even though your fps looks fine. You're not playing at the monitor's native resolution.
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1366*768=1049088 pixels
1920*1080=2073600 pixels
So your poor GFX Card has to compute double the amount. Mostly SC2 is CPU limited but with that amount of more workload the GFX Card will become the bottle neck.
As far as 720p resolution goes, most monitors have very poor downscaling ability so i'm not surprised you have a very bad experience.
I assume you have updated drivers and all?
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EPT
