On July 10 2013 17:59 Cyro wrote:Its CPU. If you want, download a benchmarking tool and compare minimum shaders to extreme, you will quickly find that the only things that affect your minimum FPS are Physics, effects and reflections, the settings that are labeled as CPU (though that's not why we know the game is cpu bound, it's just for extra obviousness)
Your graphics card load should also appear as low (not 100%) especially on lower settings, if there's some supply on the map or especially battles happening etc - my 770 for example on low settings throttled to a third of it's clock speed and still had like half utilization, on medium shaders it throttles too (for power saving) because it's not being stressed at all. Changing all of the graphics settings, aside from physics/effects/reflections (which are not graphics settings, they are cpu settings) will just make it harder on the GPU - however a good GPU, especially a powerhouse like the 660ti, is not being stressed when you are at 30fps because of all of the units and calculations. It's being stressed at the start of the game where you probably compared framerates between low/medium and extreme, where you have 200fps anyway, but not really anywhere else.
GPU load drops as the game goes on - Here's a 2x i think, of a replay where supplies start out low, raise, and then drop again on my old gtx260 on medium shaders -
Of course, our cards now (your 660ti, my 770) are like 5x+ more powerful, the game is easymode for them. If you force them not to throttle, on med shaders they'll have like 10-15% usage in a maxed fight with low FPS in the game, because CPU is holding you back, specifically one CPU core.
Note my GPU clock speeds, fan speeds, temperature. That's with 204 supply on the map, on a Haswell quad core CPU @4.6ghz (4770k in this case, but i5 4670k will perform just as well) for maximum un-cpu-binding.
You see that even though GPU is driving 181fps, it's at 705mhz instead of 1300mhz core (my boost clock) and 810mhz instead of 3800mhz VRAM and it's still only at 75% usage at those tiny clock speeds and high FPS, if you get game FPS lower, with lots of units, on any settings, usage drops like a cliff.
What you can do though is change those CPU settings (physics, effects, reflections) and you should see ~50-100%+ fps gain on your minimums, depending on the situation, with physics and reflections disabled, effects medium.
In terms of performance, i can do a benchmark with you if you want, but you can get really big performance gains from overclocking, and the newer CPU architecture (Haswell) might have really good performance gains in sc2 compared to what it got in other stuff, hopefully i'm verifying numbers on that soon. However, going from 3ghz sandy bridge (i5-2400) to 4.6ghz haswell with fast ram, twice as high minimum FPS wouldn't surprise me
Hope this has been informative, gl