I played through the entire campaign in Wings of Liberty, with no visual lag at all. Now I'm playing online, and whenever about 100 units are on screen fighting, my FPS will drop as low as 0 or 1. Video Card: ATI Radeon 5850 Video Card Driver: 8.753.0.0 (7/6/2010) OS: Windows 7 x64 Thanks for your help. This issue is bothering me quite a bit.
I don't have anything particularly helpful to say except that you should not be experiencing that problem. I have a 5850.. mobility (quite a bit slower) and I can play on all Ultra with no lag. Maybe it's just your internet? I read that if you change the window setting to "Full Screen (Windowed)" it can help FPS - although that seems as if it would do the opposite.. but you can always try.
I agree that my rig should have no trouble playing this game at all. SCII recommends Ultra for all the settings, but even using the lowest settings, I still have this issue. I just did a speed test (speedtest.net), and here are the results: Download: 19.08 Mb/s Upload: 8.73 Mb/s Ping: 34 ms With these results, I wouldn't think it would be the internet slowing anything down (The test said I could download an 800 MB movie in 6 minutes). I will try windowed mode, and see how well it works.
I think the ping times matter more than actual bandwidth. The lower, the better. That's one of the reasons people prefer LAN-play. 0ms ping time. Not sure if 34ms is considered good or bad, though.
Make sure the game isn't being blocked by a firewall and you have all the necessary ports open. 34ms is fairly good. Not the best, but doable.
The ping I gave in my last post isn't relevant, because it was the ping to the speedtest.net server, not the Battle.net servers or the other clients. 34 ms really isn't bad at all though. When playing Modern Warfare 2, it's not uncommon for people to get into games with 70 or 80 ms ping, and things aren't bad at all. Fenix, I have forwarded the main port used by Blizzard for multiplayer on my router. I don't think it's a networking issue, since I can easily join and host games and don't ever get dropped, but I don't see how it can be my video card either. Unless the drivers are faulty. Any more advice?
I would try plugging the machine directly into the internet and see how it behaves. It might be your machine needs a new Ethernet driver, or that the router isn't all that capable (which I somehow doubt). Any clue what kind of NIC card you have?
Tried plugging directly into my cable modem; no difference. Right now I am using the onboard ethernet port, but I have a PCIe ethernet card I can try, if you think it may make a difference. Just have to see if I have room on my motherboard. I'm considering removing my video card and seeing what the performance difference is. I'm not sure if SCII is only using a portion of the graphics card, or none at all. After that, I may try reverting to a previous driver for my card.
Don't remove your video card, SCII won't work at all without it. Note also that SCII should run on your computer without a problem and that the slow fps is a bug, most likely related to copy protection. http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/166496813 But yeah, as usual, make sure your all your drivers are updated, maybe try a previous version for graphics drivers. Otherwise hope for a patch.
Thanks for the link peterius. I perused the forum, and I found a couple potential solutions: 1) Change sound to 'Stereo'. Not sure what it is currently set on, and disabling sound all together did not working, so I'm not holding out much hope for this. 2) Install driver, Catalyst Control Center 10.6 after completely removing old driver. This isn't the most recent driver, but some people have said it worked for them. I will try this stuff this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes.
Alright. I'm in a better situation now, even though it's not completely fixed. I'm now getting a minimum of 3 fps even when a massive number of units are on the screen. I'm also getting a maximum over 40 (wasn't happening in game before). Here's what I did: 1) Uninstall everything from ATI (Catalyst Control Center, drivers, etc.). Restart. 2) Install Catalyst Control Center v 10.6. NOTE: This is NOT the latest version of the driver. Restart. 3) I also installed ATI Tray Tools. This is not required, but gave me an accurate fps reading. 4) I also changed a few settings in SCII, including Vertical Sync, and setting sound as 'Stereo'. Unfortunately I made all of these changes at the same time, not over the course of hours so I cannot determine which changes had the biggest affects. PS: I'm getting 90 fps in Modern Warfare 2 with all graphics on their highest settings @ 1400x900.
I'm curious, you said you experienced this issue in multiplayer? Were you getting popups about "such and such player is slowing down the game." ?
If that pop-up window is occuring, and you are experiencing lag/ framerate drops, the person who is slowing the game is to blame.
Yeah, I played a game with my brother last night, and that kept popping up, and the last 20 minutes of the game, which should have taken 5 minutes, were a slideshow of my mutalisks slowly skipping across the screen. Like... 3 frames per minute.
Yes, I frequently get messages that I or someone else is slowing down the game. Most often it seems that I am the culprit, but not sure why. I'm not sure how someone elses computer would slow down my video though.
