SC2 performance issues

[Mastahnips]

Hey, I'm having performance problems playing Starcraft 2. I don't have problems in 1v1s but 3v3s or higher and most custom games my FPS drops to nil. I'm currently playing on the absolutely lowest graphics, I can run 1v1s in high settings but i keep it on the lowest instead of having to switch constantly. I have a widescreen 1440x900 resolution monitor but i currently play at 1280x960.

My specs are as follows:
CPU: AMD Athlon II 640 quad-core 3.0 GHz
MOBO: MSI 870A-G54
Memory: 4GB Corsair DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
GPU: PowerColor AMD Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5
HDD: 500GB 7200 rpm

Nothing is overclocked.
What's slowing down my system in starcraft 2? Or what would be the next upgrade to go for to improve performance?

 

[Guest]

I would first try updating your video card drivers. The newer versions have been tweaked to allow better performance.

 

[Mastahnips]

My drivers can't be over 2 months old but i'm downloading the newest ones now. Any other suggestions?

 

[MXGame]

Starcraft 2 uses the CPU heavily, so I'm not sure if your graphic card or your CPU is slowing down the game. TomsHardware did a Starcraft 2 benchmark test with a GTX 480 with many different CPU.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gaming-cpu-core-i3-2100-phenom-ii-x6-1075t,2859-8.html

The benchmark gave a minimum of 10 FPS on a Athlon 2 X4 645, which is the CPU most similar to yours even though they used a GTX 480. They are testing at a much higher resolution and higher graphic settings though.

 

[Mastahnips]

Thank you for the info, huge help. So if they're benchmarking higher FPS with a similar CPU then it's most likely the GPU slowing me down most then right?

 

[MXGame]

I think its a mix of both the GPU and CPU slowing down your game. The HD 5770 is a decent graphic card, so I'm not sure if upgrading the GPU without upgrading the CPU would help much.

 

[Guest]

I would say it's your graphics card. My bud runs the game on a AII X4 635 and a older GTX 260 (216 edition) and get's Ultra every time. I'm not 100% on this, but those 5770's are at about that level (with DX11, of course). Leads me to believe it's a driver issue. Or just the card isn't powerful enough. Lower your settings to High? Dunno what else to say, really. Also this game, like WoW, is pretty biased against AMD. It's optimized for Intel/Nvidia setups. It WILL run on AMD, it's just faster on Intel. Just wanted to throw that in.

 

[Mastahnips]

Yeah those benchmark tests showed pretty clearly that intel was favored for blizzard games. It's not that I can't play the campaign on ultra it's just the larger multiplayer games on SC that kill my FPS so from that would it be better to upgrade the CPU or the GPU?

Edit: Oh and i have the latest drivers now, they do soom to have improved performance a tiny bit.

 

[Guest]

Well before you spend any cash, I must ask a very basic question. What kind of ISP do you have? Cable or DSL? Sometimes it's net-congestion or maybe you need a faster connection. Best advice would be go to a friends house that has a cable connection and see if the problem persists on your PC. I know, it's kind of a hassle, but it's better than spending cash you might not have needed to spend.

 

[Mastahnips]

I have a cable ISP and my internet definitely isn't horrendous. Speedtest.net gave it a ping of 23, 16.71 Mbps download and 1.57 Mbps upload.

Also, i was running a particularly intensive custom game at what SC2 showed as 0 FPS, it was pretty bad, in windowed mode with CCC up to see GPU heat/activity, as well as checking CPU-Z to see CPU activity.

CCC showed that my GPUs temperature remained constant at around 50 degrees Celsius, and when it actually did give me an activity level reading it wasn't above 50%, fan speed also did not exceed 50%.

As for CPU-Z it showed that my CPU was running in its clocked down power saving state of 800 MHz at 4.0x multiplier. When under extreme load with something like prime95 it shows a constant 3.0GHz at 15.0x multiplier.

So at this point I'm not even sure whether SC2 is taxing my CPU or GPU that badly, yet i'm trudging along at low FPS in larger games. First, is there any recommendations for good benchmarking software that i can use to tax my GPU/CPU to see if their just underperforming or if SC2 isn't taxing them?

Also, Is there anything else I should be looking at that can cause my FPS to drop so low? I know my PSU is powerful enough to handle my system. Any suggestions?

 

[math1337]

Couldn't you run task manager while you play to see if your cpu usage maxes out on larger games, and see if it's less on smaller games? If it's always at 100 for large games, then you would be having a cpu problem. I don't see any way that your graphics card is a problem, because the fps is still low at min graphics settings.

 

[Mastahnips]

Again, task manager is showing CPU usage around 40%, memory usage a constant 57%. GPU temp and fan speed remains constant. Is there something else i should be looking at that might be causing the bottleneck in FPS?

Edit: but yes i tried raising the graphics and it didn't seem to affect performance at all so i don't believe that it's the GPU.

 

[Guest]

Contact Blizz and see what they say. If it's just in this one game, it's something to do with them.