StarCraft II lets us control a lot of options, and I personally do not want to miss any detail I could go get without causing lag/over-heat.

Seeing as how some of the individual options seems to be based on the performances of one specific part of my computer, I'd like to know:

1) How to get all the relevant informations about each of my computer component's performances that have to do with the options?
2) With the knowledge of the informations gotten with the help of the question above, how far can I push my computer by increasing sc2's rendering quality?

Play a Melee game against computer. Start on all lowest settings, put them gradually up until you can play with no jerkiness. Also, run fraps or something in the background so you can see the frames per second you are receiving. Before I upgraded my computer I was forced to play on lowest settings, and thinking back, I actually preferred it that way - found it easier to see what was going on. Now I play on ultra, and it took a while to acclimatise to it. There is a debate in professional gaming (and has been for the past decade or so) about what is optimal FPS. I'd say that 30 to 50 is necessary for most games, and probably adequate for an RTS like Starcraft 2. But then again - first person shooters (also abbr. to FPS...) such as Counter-strike and halo would all argue that the higher your FPS (frames per second) the better. The human eye notices very little difference in FPS greater than 50 , since the human eye only records at 24.5 fps (which is what most films/etc are recorded at).

The general consensus is that the higher frames per second you can achieve the better. But what is most important is that they are stable. For example, you should be getting 50 frames per second at the start of a game with 6 probes harvesting, and 50 frames per second when two max supplied armies duke it out. But this distinction is mostly relevant to first person shooters.

But yeah. Can't exactly answer your question directly since I don't have Starcraft 2 on my laptop. You can turn off 3D, Animated unit portraits. :)

Edit: Also, post your computer spec - use Piriform's Speccy tool.

Post has been edited 3 time(s), last time on Jan 19 2011, 3:16 pm by NudeRaider. Reason: removed flame

ctrl + alt + F brings up sc2's frame counter, too. You can use that instead of fraps. That display is nearly as good as fraps' one.

Heat problems:
- SC2 has no framelimit set by default. You have to manually set it in the variables.txt in sc2's documents folder.
I'm using this limit settings by myself atm.
frameratecap=60
frameratecapGlue=30

If your hardware melts, the problem was the cooling and not sc2 running everything at 100% for max frames. Anyway I don't like that move by Blizzard.

How many FPS do YOU need?
- You need as many FPS that you need to see and act smoothly. I'm pretty sensitive in comparative gaming with FPS laggyness. Maybe because I notice bigger frame drops with my mouse and can see it, too (maybe my monitor's fault) [not so much in SC2].
Stable 30 fps should be enough for most persons. It's really depending how much you notice it.

Btw, in some games you use even more fps because you get some "benefit" through some fps values like in all q3 engine games (e.g. jump slightly higher/ move faster).

Details and overview:
- To many details and fancy explosions distract the eye/your brain. You see important things faster without having everything shining in your view.
- But in sc2 you have cloaked units and forcefields and burrowed moving units and it may be harder to spot them on low details.
-> Using a good mix seems to be the best for competetive gaming.

If you are only enjoying the game regardless how smooth you can play it and just want to see how beautiful everything can look, play the campaign and custom games and get the highest settings you want to have. But you just might tend to lag in extreme situations.

I've played the campaign as beautiful as I could without having lags and I'm playing multiplayer as "easy" as I can have it.

my multiplayer settings:
-everything is low or disabled
-exceptions: textures are ultra, models are high

Nice post on Teamliquid showing some setting differences
The fourth pic shows how I see the things...

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 19 2011, 2:24 pm by Ahli.

Thank you.

Sounds like someone plays Promod.

Best I can say about this is: Guess and test. I personally favor having a safe 50fps average for newer games, although if you want to play custom maps on SC2 you may need more than that without getting a mouthful of lag.

Motion will be more smooth if you use the refresh rate as the limit rather than 50. If it is 50 Hz, then 50 fps limit would be fine, but 60 fps limit would be better if your refresh rate is 60 Hz.

I mean as a target optimal range for general playability.

There is no point in ever going above 30fps. The human eye sees at 29.93 FPS, which is what all movies are recorded at. There is no difference between 30fps and 50fps. However, refresh rate and interlacing may affect the quality, but the FPS won't matter.

Source, please? As for me, I can definitely tell the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps when I'm watching something. (I used 30 and 60 for my example because something that doesn't divide evenly into the refresh rate would possibly be more noticeable) Also, movies are usually at about 24 fps, not at about 30.

Lots of people say they can see differences between 30fps and higher speeds, and IIRC some studies have shown that some people can differentiate up around 70-80.

I can tell the difference between 100 fps and 500 fps, not through the video but the response time. 500 fps is clearly faster at responding to your mouse movement than 100 fps.

It's difficult for me to discern the video formats (24, 25, 30 fps) if the rate is constant. However I can certainly notice microstutter (~20 fps in the middle of a fairly consistent 30+ fps stream) to the point where it makes having dual GPUs almost worthless.

All this talk on what we can see entirely up to diminishing returns. Certainly videos over 30 fps are subject to negligible gain with an exponential increase in size/processing speed. It's the same thing as whether or not to use an 85 jpg, 95 jpg, 100 jpg, or a png.