So I’m getting quite tired of dealing with frame drops when playing Co-op. I’ve been tinkering with my settings, but to little to no progress on improving my frame drop issues. The most egregious of offenders are COs with massive armies (Stukov, Zagara, Stettman), those who cause a lot of internal calculations (Stettman), and Zerglings in general. I’m unsure on what should be changed, outside of upgrading parts (which is very difficult for me, as new parts are expensive.) Only Co-op has this issue for me, or massive multiplayer games. More so Co-op.
Settings:
Windowed Fullscreen
V-Sync: Disabled
Antialias: Disabled
Graphics Quality: Custom (Suggested: High)
Shaders: High
Lighting: Low
Shadows: Medium
Terrain: Medium
Reflections: Off
Effects: Low
Texture Quality: High
Post-Processing: Low
Physics: Off
Models: High
Unit Portraits: 3D
Movies: High
Indirect Shadows (Disabled): Off
Gameplay:
Unit Life Bars: Always
Control Groups: Unclickable
Flyer Helper: Always
I’m not informed at all about this stuff anymore and I know hardware changes aren’t an option for you at the moment but could it be the case that you might notice a significant performance increase if you switched to an SSD?
I ask this as at a glance it seems like a pretty good system and comparable to mine except for in this one area and I just run everything at high graphics and barely ever notice a performance drop except in the most extreme cases (Diffusion + Concussive Attacks + Fenix Carriers + Karax Carriers comes to mind as a game which saw a significant Performance issue! Though don’t judge the carrier builds as both commanders were <15).
I could switch to an SSD, I just don’t currently have a reason to aside from this. My old HDD isn’t near failure yet, and I’d rather wait until it’s close to its death to replace it. (Yes, I know master/slave drives are a thing, I’m just being picky.) Honestly, if it is an SSD vs HDD issue, that would be quite something, but I’m not 100% sure myself.
I’ll personally say I doubt it’s the HDD, unless you’re using one from a laptop that only spins at 5400rpm instead of the usual 7200. And even then, I’m quite certain it’s still going up with SATA cables. For reference, I’m using a 4tb HDD filled to 80% capacity with questionable pictures of Swann and Abathur making cute “things” by their love of perfect organisms and machines.
Aside from that, I’ve got my settings cranked high with no issues with those commanders. However, I’m using an i7 processor with a GTX2070 graphics card.
I thought SC2 was more processor reliant though. Not sure how optimized it is for multiple cores. You might be able to go into your task manager and try to set SC2 as a “High” process priority as well.
I honestly don’t recall what RPM my drive spins at, but it’s an ooooold drive. Like from… I think Vista or Early 7 levels of old. Doing a quick search shows 7200 RPM.
You being on an i7 with a higher rated GPU definitely gives you an edge over my machine.
I think that’s set on default. It could very well be the culprit, but I’m unsure on what a reasonable number would be, lol.
I’ve turned most of my settings down, I just have a stick up my butt about some of them. I used to run the game on recommended High settings and cranked down various ones that didn’t seem necessary.
Going off what Undead said, I know that in D3, using more sound channels than your sound card has will lag the game, so it is possible that it’s bottlenecking you as well.
Your specs are right around official recommended specs. Historically with Bliz, that usually means decent performance with the load that 2 players produce. Meaning you plus an AI (campaign) or you plus another player (versus), etc. Going beyond that starts to tax the system.
Add to that the “busy” commanders and it could start to approach the load equivelent of 4, 6 or even 8 players. So I’d say with what you have, lags are not unexpected.
Outside of upgrading, you may need to start lowering the graphics settings to reduce the stutter. Some of the settings are bigger resource hogs than others.
An SSD will help some, but I don’t think it’s the limiting factor in this case. An SSD will speed up the map loading time (loading screen) and will reduce any stutter when in-game assets are called (loaded from HD to RAM) for the first time. There are old arcade “maps” that will load the vast majority of assests for you ahead of time. They have names like “Unit Preloader”. If there is a LotV version, that would be a good one to try to see if it helps, but I suspect it won’t do much.
The loading should be minimized generally, as I do run the LotV Pre-loader before playing anything in SC2.
Sucks that I gotta crank down my graphical settings and live on a potato, lol. I was enjoying playing with my decently nice visuals.
I’m going to check with the Bliz TS guys to see which settings are generally the hardest on performance. That way you can start with those when trying to find a good balance between visuals and smoothness. I’ll report back when I hear from them.
Have you tried with Fullscreen rather than Windowed Fullscreen?
Does having everything in SC2 settings at minimum make a difference? - Just to try to narrow down the cause. Turn off in-game voice chat as well.
I think the most likely culprit is Windows or something running in the background. Try opening the Task Manager to the Performance tab, play the game, and tab out to get a quick overview.
Also, try running GPU-Z on the Sensors tab while playing to see how hard your graphics card is being pushed. Run HWInfo to product a system report and have the sensors open while playing to see if CPU temps are reaching throttling levels.
In-game voice chat is already off.
I play Windowed Fullscreen as it allows me to flip windows without SC2 minimizing, especially so when I rarely stream. (Keep in mind that 99% of the time I’m playing SC2, it is without streaming.)
I keep tabs on performance using OpenHardwareMonitor. Running a game now to see where my stats go.
I watched my stats during fights… Even though I had massive frame drops, my cpu only peaked at around 60%, and my GPU went up to 20% max during it. RAM held steady below 50%, and temperatures ony ever peaked at 55*C, well below critical temperatures.
Ok, good work on checking sys info. For the CPU, what’s the single core usage? Is that 60% whole cpu? In which case that 60% case on a 4-core probably means SC2 is pegging 100% on one core. Also, are you seeing any other processes using CPU while playing? For example, Chrome open can cause issues due to rogue scripts running in the background.
Nope, it’s actually only one core capping at 60%. The other three were around 30 to 50.
The only other processes running are either system processes, AV process, Steam, Discord, and NVidia + My headset’s process. The heaviest of which are AV and Steam.
We all get distracted sometimes. Two nights ago my army wouldn’t respond after dropping an Airstrike and I lost everything except a Raven and a Marauder, including Nova.
I’ll definitely tinker with those settings first.
My Shadows only goes down to Medium while in-game, lol.
Edit: Played another game with Stettman. Tried turning down sound channels from 64 to 40… then 40 to 20… No real difference at all. Tried turning shadows and texture quality down to Medium and Low respectively… Still no real improvement. This one is a real stumper.
Edit 2: Tried turning HP bars down to “Damaged” and it helps a little, but still, frame drops. I guess either SC2 doesn’t like me, or my machine is just jank.
Just tinkered with some settings a little bit and went to play a game as Abathur with a Tychus ally. Something went haywire and the game straight up crashed. Didn’t even produce a crash folder in the GameLogs folder.
Looking at the graphics.txt and systeminfo.txt… Seems like SC2 is having a meltdown. Texture Databases not matching for Tychus, and D3D9 Resets/Lost D3D9s in there.
Edit: Tinkered with some other settings, seems like Shaders is actually the one at fault of all things. So my game looks like a potato, but frame drops are minimized when playing Stettman. (As an aside note, he looks cursed as heck on the Co-op selection screen.)
If you’re noticing some mismatches like that, you may want to try reinstalling the game, or verifying the integrity of the game files (not sure if the launcher has that option or not).
