Everyone who has a slow laptop/PC and is struggling running this game with a decent frame rate even on the lowest possible settings, check this video.
I spent 1 month analyzing HOTS performance bottlenecks and used my knowledge of a professional graphics programmer to create a solution that make the game playable on a pretty crappy hardware. Because my HW is also crappy, the video performance is terrible, but it shows the possibilities!
Since I cannot post links here, check the download link under the video description.
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The utility can:
Utilize more cores of your PC
Drastically decrease the texture and geometry quality
The video shows 10-20 fps because my laptop is not capable of recording also video at the same time, so you don’t see the fps improvement there.
But normally with the utility I play the game at 60fps on integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000 card, which is 8 years old crap. But I admit it depends on the current CPU temperature and the scene (usually zagara creeps are killing my fps, probably huge overdraw). But without the utility I can play it only at 10-25 fps so it’s unplayable.
Yes it differs from just playing at very low settings - HOTS is a heavily singlethreaded application and I managed to run the rendering on another thread, so this is a big improvement. Another thing is that the utility allows to set significantly lower settings than the game offers.
On the github link I listed a few additional improvements that that are possible and I tried to implement, but without direct access to the source code I couldnt implement it, but I discovered more possibilities without quality loss if there is any interest (e.g. reducing cpu to gpu constant buffer copies).
If true, that app should be a community staple that also gets posted on Reddit. There is a massive amount of people playing this on old toasters or weak laptops who would probably start playing again if they could play at 60fps.
I remember installing the game on a friends laptop in 2015-2016 and it was a choppy mess at ~15 FPS because it had an integrated Intel GPU with a weak Celeron even with everything turned to very low.
You’ll likely run into more CPU constraints than GPU. Most games have insane amounts of variables and parameters you can modify to reduce GPU strain, but never as many that can bring down CPU overhead.
I used to mod CVARs in Vindictus, which uses a bizarre custom Source engine. Though I could make the game playable on bad PCs, most of the impact players had access to was GPU related items, and that engine was already CPU-heavy to begin with.
