Hey guys, first post here. I came to find out some information on playing SC2 with a Radeon HD 5850. The framerates I'm getting are a little underwhelming sometimes. When not much is going on in-game I see my FPS as high as 70-80, but it's dropped as low as 15-20 in when large armies are at play. I was under the impression that my upgraded rig would handle SC2 really well, and I didn't expect low framerates or lag anywhere/any time. The video settings are maxed our across the board, however. Specs: AMD Phenom II 6-core 2.8Ghz XFX Radeon HD 5850 4G DDR3 1333Mhz Windows 7 32-bit I was thinking that maybe the 32-bit OS is hindering my hardware's ability, but I'm not sure. I'm running at 1280x1024 res, btw. Any suggestions or comments? Thanks guys.
32-bit shouldn't cause such a problem. Cliché sentence coming up, but check your drivers. Also make sure your case gets enough cooling... I would suspect throttling of some kind.
Can you verify that your graphics card is working with full clock speed? Actually, this just happened to me: I accidently forgot to clock my card up to full (normal) speed, after I clocked it down to 200 MHz (lol) some months ago, since I was only using 2D applications and no games in the last couple of months...
I'll check the drivers. And what is throttling? Also, how do I verify that it's running at full clock speed?
Turn off FSAA if you are forcing it on in the CCC. If you want to play with FSAA, use the Catylist 10.7a beta drivers as it addresses FSAA issues. I will tell you, upgrading to a 64-bit OS can help improve performance, because you will have more RAM available to the OS. 32-bit OS'es have a CAP of 4GB total, and this includes your video ram! Video ram has to be alocated by the system so your videocard will work, so... if you have 1GB of Video ram: 4GB total - 1GB Video ram = 3GB system ram. Vista 32 (SP1, original doesnt' do this) and Win 7 32 lie about how much ram is installed into the system. I mean, sure its in the system, but the 32-bit OS isn't using all of it. Bright side, you can upgrade to 64-bit for free. Just get a 64-bit disc, and use your 32-bit key. Will it fix your issue, probably not. But it can't hurt. Try the drivers first and see what it does for you.
A hexa-core is pretty useless for SC2. You would have been better off getting the Phenom II X4 965 BE. I know you probably don't want to hear this but try lowering some of the CPU-dependent settings (e.g. reflections, physics). I think the problem isn't that your GPU is underperforming. It's just not getting enough data from the CPU.
