Your CPU is bottlenecking the game. RTS games push your CPU a lot and most of the frame dropping is caused as a result of the CPU being over schedualed.
I am not entirly sure about that. They often run at lower clock rates due to heat problems.
Fill rate bottleneck? Perhapse memory bandwidth and quantity? Especially since you are using a laptop you likely have a rather poor graphic card compared to the similar named desktop versions (which usually are 4-8 times the physical size).
Well, mine has 2.4 GHz which is not bad at all. Of course I could overclock it, but, since all other games (including strategies) work fine, I don't want to. And, anyway, say, 3 GHz compared to 2.4 GHz shouldn't make that much difference.
Memory is 8 Gb and pretty fast. Graphic card is NVidia GTX 560M which is close to desktop NVidia 550 - anyway, as I said, graphics settings do not change performance significantly in my case.
You are joking right?
StarCraft II uses more resources per unit. This should be obvious by how you can move 400 zerglings at once while in WarCraft III the same army will move like a joke (single stream of units).
OK, take the most possibly horrible experience (excluding some special custom maps): 4v4, everyone has 200/200 and all of these are zerlings. OK, 1600 zerglings and, say, even 3200 buildings (absolutely impossible, but suppose so). Total of about 5000 units, including neutral creeps, minerals and so on.
As much as I loved the old starwars, you must be kidding... The fact all the computers look like museume pieces for a start and how robots are not used for combat extensivly while in 30 years time here in reality there might be fully automated armies.
Texture quality has no impact on performance if your graphic card has enough GPU memory. It takes the card the same time to render a 32*32 texture (like from N64 games) as it does a 2048*2048 texture. It will however drasticly slow performance if your card does run out of memory as then it has to thrash the PCI-E bus. As all gamming cards have atleast 1 GB now (usually towards 3 for searious pieces) this is no problem in SC2 and you can set ultra textures without a single frame drop in all circumstances. Even a 8800 GT which burns out if it runs SC2 on ultra is capable of ultra textures without any heat problems as long as other things are set to low.
Do not try to "bull shit" me. I know exactly how WarCraft III moves units and it is physically not possible to move 5000 units together with collision. Tower defenses got away with 400 per player by cheating and removing all collision to optimize mini-move performance. In WarCraft III if 2 units collide they cancel any existing mini-move order and the unit is stationary until the mini-move generator task (run every frame for every player) reaches that unit again.
I agree, it is the collision that is. You could get the same effect in WC3 by getting 100 air units to stack up (attacking a target) and then ordering them to stop. The air units pushed each other appart which would often drop frame rate drasticly when it occured. Unlike WarCraft III where that mechanic was only used for air units when stationary, StarCraft II uses it for all units all the time allowing you to make big units like a "megalisk" push away small units which is not possible in WC3.
And watch how they form a chain accross the map. Only if collision is disabled will they move vaguely well. Complex terrain will also degrade their movement performance as mini-moves will be shorter.
They are probably less demanding than the billboards in WarCraft III as they use Direct3D 10. In worst case the sparks will be as demanding as any particle WarCraft III used.
In theory that all sounds great. But now my card has 1.5 GB of memory and it was enough even for Battlefield 3 to run on absolutely highest settings with some tweaking for TXAA and 3D Vision! (Just to mention, 3D mode decreases FPS to about 1/3 and increases textures by about 100%) There is no good explanation on Earth why some RTS game with far from top graphics has these issues.
Why not? You just add a single trigger which checks every 0.01 seconds for every unit if it's stuck, and then, if it is, move units around it on the direction off the unit. In REALLY big unit packs (200-300 units) this simple scheme will not work properly, but then in actual Starcraft 2 code you can just check it not 0.01 seconds, but 0.001 seconds or even more frequently. Even if there are 5000 units on the map, this simple check will cost almost 0% of processor performance.
Well, you have a point here. But if this is the main reason of framerate drop, then it just shouldn't have been implemented, at least exactly as it was done. Anyway, the game is heavy on processors even on small 1v1 maps at the very beginning, where the only units able to collide are 6 workers. It doesn't explain poor performance in these situations.
This is because they are running in SLI mode. Some graphic pipelines scale near linearly with SLI while others will actually perform worse. In most cases turning off SLI will give them near flawless performance. Additionally the use of graphic HUDs like steam will also greatly degrade performance.
It is nothing to do with the textures or video memory, some other part of the graphic card is bottlenecking the performance. This could be anything from heat (if the card overheats it starts to reduce clock rate inorder to prevent damage) to poor drivers (very common with AMD cards).
In WarCraft III JASS executes extreemly slowly. All referenced names (like native calls) go through a hash lookup process multiple times each time they are referenced. Moving 100 objects 100 times a second in WC3 starts to push modern processors (remember WC3 is only single threaded). If they start to push other units that is even more load as group searches are not the quickest to perform. By the time 200-300 units are doing this then WarCraft III will be unplayable, maybe not if they stand alone but definatly when clustered together.
The way you mentioned it will cost a ton of processor time. Triggers do not compile to native machine code and even StarCraft II Galaxy virtual machine, although much faster than WarCraft III JASS, still is not as fast as machine code.
There is no poor performance in these situations. If there is then something is not right with your computer hardware (which should not be the case for gamming cards from Nvidia and performance processors from Intel). I have constant 60 FPS on ultra in such situations with only the odd frame drop when content is first loaded (not noticable). I am using a first generation I7 processor and a Nvidia 275 GTX, both prety dated by comparison to newer equivelents.
I think the computers are acting not as good as they should be. Also remember that StarCraft II is only dual threaded so will perform the same weather it is given 2 dedicated processors or more. Having a 6 or 8 core machine will not make you play StarCraft II any better than a Tri core machine with same core design. Infact StarCraft II might even perform the same with just 2 processors as it cannot even load 2 to 100% due to synchronization required.
The game has a totally different set of requirements from a RTS game and so will perform differently.
It is not that processor demanding. It only uses 2 main threads and even then both will never load cores to 100%. If the CPU is bottlenecking then you should consider upgrading to a quad core with atleast 2.7 GHz (what I use).
Funny thing is that in my case actually processor time is mostly wasted (about 15% or so go to SC2, and that is by the end of a game, and at start it's 10%), but GPU is bottlenecking. But it is the same GPU I used to play on highest settings in many different games, all went well, maybe, except for Dragon Age II (but there Bioware admits that optimization in DA2 is just terrible). So how comes I can't play SC2 without lag on lowest settings??? I'm totally confused...
You did turn on vertical syncrhonization and limit the frame rate right? Otherwise it will constantly render frames as fast as possible using the GPU near 100%.
I am sure if you went to play some old game from 2000 without turning on vertical synchronization it will also load your GPU to near 100%. Also be aware that laptops will lower the clock rate when running from battery for extended life.
Unless the map is badly made it should not lag at all on a top end computer. Either the map maker has no idea of optimization (one of those thread spamming guys) or the system is not top end.
No it is just my video card is a desktop card which is probably 4 to 8 times stronger than yours. My processor is also 2.7 GHz so slightly faster as well. There is a reason gammers do not recommend using a laptop to game.
The type of graphics being performed is totally different.
Probably your M card is the reason. Are you using the lattest video drivers?
Even so, that doesn't explain how I am able to play almost all modern games on highest possible settings with stable >60 FPS and not able to play SC2 on lowest possible with stable >20 FPS.
Which is why I said some. I do agree with what you said as many games ran on independant game FPS that was clock synchronized.
SLI is well known to cause performance problems. Games need to be specially designed or driver patched to support SLI on a card per card baisis. Such people will get higher performance turning SLI off for StarCraft II than with it on due to this. The reason is not all shader pipe-lines scale very well with SLI. Sometimes the drivers produce control instructions in such a way that it thrashes the SLI bridge between the cards resulting in a bottleneck. Crossfire (AMD's equivelent) is also prone to the same problems. SLI only really peaks in efficiency when it comes to 3D or multiple displays as each display or interlaced image comes from a dedicated GPU obtaining maximum parallelisim without any inter-card communication next to frame buffers (so it appears on the right output).
Sorry I am not the right person to ask about laptops. I mostly know desktop hardware.
Told you so! Anyway glad you finally get to experience the StarCraft II that you should. Maybe use Ultra for custom maps, pros use low for melee anyway to avoid the frame drops. Extreeme is not advisable for a laptop as it turns on a demanding shader opperation, ultra should perform about 10%-20% better.
