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Hi TL folks, this is my first thread here ever, but since this seems to be a forbidden topic on blizz forums, I would like to humbly ask for your patience with me.
The thing is that I have a work i5 laptop, which I was just given without a say about its specs. It plays SC2 reasonably well even though the GPU is integrated (because the i5 "integrated" is a different level from the old GMA graphics), but it lags in specific situations, namely around those animated gas LOS blockers (there are minor effects in some other places, but I cannot find a pattern in them, but the gas-LOS issue is the most important).
I have everything on the lowest settings and I have gardened the system to its best, still the proble is here. I wonder if anybody knows whether these animations could be turned off somehow, via a registry or some configuration file edit? It just seems odd to me that you can turn of almost anything using the graphics settings in SC2, but not a couple of pointless animations.
I would be even willing to try a hack on this, if someone knows with one, as I don't think turnning off some shiny jibberish gives me an unfair edge. As of now, its quite unfair the other way around. Or, you canthink about it as an additional level of strategy I have to take into account, engaging armies only in non-laggy areas? 
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Lowering the resolution helps greatly with the integrated chips.
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Thanks, I lowered from 1440x900 (native of my external monitor) to 1024x768 and it seems to be better. (But I have to play on the notebook's display as it somehow works very badly with the external one).
I would really think that 1440x900 is already "low", but this really seems like a very good advice.
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There's a way to completely turn shadows off by editing the preference file. Google should bring up how to do it.
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The reason the gas LOS blockers kill it is that they use vertex shaders, and if your system doesn't have fast vertex shaders (which it apparently doesn't) then it'll kill performance. I'm not sure if there is a way to lower the vertex shader quality lower than the normal settings ingame allow, but you should look into that.
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Yeah resolution is important; 1440x900 is high for a laptop with an integrated graphics card.
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There's not much you can do— aside from lowering resolution of course.
-You can turn off fog (don't think this does much)
-You can turn off blob-shadows (again probably doesn't do much)
-You can change texture space, but this can also cause performance issues as well I think.
Oh one more thing, v-sync. Should ensure it's disabled, because it can lower FPS.
Search TL (or probably even google) for "comprehensive variables.txt", I made a topic about it here in TL and on official SC2 forums.
Overall, there's now much you can do to improve from lowest settings.
Your best bet would probably be to buy a 60$ video card. The i5 CPU should run SC2 quite well (when accompanied by adequate graphics support), although it depends a bit on what type of i5 it is.
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Thanks for all the advice, I will try to do the suggested search.
Buying a graphics card is not an option, it is a laptop. I don't want to get a desktop as we already have one (that's where my wife plays, we are a happy family )
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Additional things you can do which greatly improves performance is to set lighting=0 as well as make sure no shadows in on at all in variables.txt (found in my documents/starcraft 2)
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lower the sound quality option is also help.
like reducing the sound channel and all the extra feature.
worst case cenario you could try to turn off explorer.exe after turning on the game and revive it after you done playing sc2
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EPT
