Starcraft 2 GPU / CPU Scaling Graphs

[Maximilian]

Ive tried watching replays with everything maxed and the extreme shader option on my i7 rig at 1920x1080, it runs fine in normal 1v1 games, slows down slightly when i zoom in. GPU max load was 87%, max temp was 65*C. The cpu wasent stressed all that much, pretty standard temps with that, but the GPU takes a beating heh, its like its playing crysis

Ill likely have to turn the settings down a bit for large 4v4/3v3 money map games which is what i typically do, until custom maps come along anyways, unless more units = more CPU stress in which case it should be fine.

 

[frozentundra123456]

I also noticed that they ran at 1680x1050 and max details. Dont you usually run at low resolutions and graphical settings to test CPUs???
However, I am sort of surprised. Blizzard games usually run well on most any hardware. This game may not. Even with the high end system (5870 and Core I7) they are getting only about 45 frames per second. Seems really low.

 

[frozentundra123456]

Hopefully SC2 will be great. I have not played the original. RTS games used to be my favorites, but really there has been no innovation in RTS in a long time. Yes, Supreme Commander was good, but what do we get--expansions and now a sequel that is probably dumbed down from the original. World in Conflict--a lame expansion that required you to replay the original game too. Red Alert and Command and Conquer--more expansions that are ok at best.
Same for Company of Heroes. Two expansions that were OK then Opposing Fronts which was not that great. BTW, it is a good game I guess, but COH is one of the most frustrating games I ever played. Just cant get the hang of it I guess.
Maybe I will have to go back to Rise of Nations or Age of Mythology again.

 

[Maximilian]

Actually, StarCraft 1 didnt run on EVERYTHING. You needed Windows 95 and a pentium. At the time not EVERYBODY had that. But it ran on MOST things which is more than you can say for the average video game today.

This sucker (at debut) will run on more systems out there than any other current 3D game at debut. Dual core is very common right now and as they already pointed out, it was the particles that really stressed the CPU. It might not look super pretty on my Radeon X1550, but that wont affect the game play.

I had a matrox millenium G somthing that lagged with starcraft :/ First time ive ever seen SC lag due to hardware, the people in my game were not happy lol.

 

[Kabob]

Actually, StarCraft 1 didnt run on EVERYTHING. You needed Windows 95 and a pentium. At the time not EVERYBODY had that. But it ran on MOST things which is more than you can say for the average video game today.

This sucker (at debut) will run on more systems out there than any other current 3D game at debut. Dual core is very common right now and as they already pointed out, it was the particles that really stressed the CPU. It might not look super pretty on my Radeon X1550, but that wont affect the game play.

We bought our P1 in 1992, so a 6 year old machine ran it fine. Dual core came out what, 4 years ago? Not quite as long a time for people to replace/upgrade their machines. I honestly do not think my 2005 machine will be able to handle SC2 with any sort of decency...at all.

 

[Fenixgoon]

how do you get fraps to record framerates only? i'd love to see what kind of #'s my system pulls

 

[Genx87]

Yikes that isnt a very high resolution by todays standards and they are using the fastest GPU out at the moment and low AA and no AF? This thing has some serious hardware requirements!

 

[borisvodofsky]

I don't understand why, but the entire game looks very very FLAT to me. and the colors are just jumping out at you completely messing up the atmosphere.

 

[Udgnim]

how do you get fraps to record framerates only? i'd love to see what kind of #'s my system pulls

FRAPS has a benchmark function under its FPS tab

 

[soccerballtux]

Those look very weird...

A E6600/Q6600 slower than a X2 6000? The Core architecture is a lot faster clock for clock than the old K8. So a 3.0GHz K8 > 2.4GHz Core2 - which would be a first, ever.

On the other side a Core i5 750 is faster than a Q9650. So... 2.6GHz "Nehalem" > 3.0GHz Core2.

The only conclusion is that for some reason the Core2 architecture is very weak in this game. Very weak.

Also, max two threads (E6600 ~ Q6600 and E8400 ~ Q9650). Hopefully that's just the beta.

HAHA, You sounding like you leaning to become a fanboi. haha naw jk. IDK bout Very weak.

I think Blizzard really fucked up here. Barriers to Entry is VERY VERY high for this game. even little kids know what good vs bad graphics are these days, but MOST little kids are in no position to buy Hardware.

Xbox might have low res, but most games run very smoothly. and that is what the upcoming crowd is getting used to. The jutters would really kill the emersion. Blizzard should've coded the game for Far lesser hardware. When starcraft 1 came out, it RAN on EVERYTHING. :hmm::hmm:

could be the IMC is helping with the branch latency. Games are very branch heavy with kind of branches you can't reliably predict (well, not with 97% accuracy like most other branch code).

That said, I think single threaded IPC will be king with this game-- a 4.8Ghz e8400 or i3 will probably beat a 3.5ghz quad Ph2 (like mine). I say this b/c it's more or less a single threaded game.

I am very disappointed with Blizzard's programming.

 

[soccerballtux]

Then please go to your bnet account and opt out of the beta...one more key for me to possibly nab!

i was just watching replays, don't have a bnet acct

 

[dguy6789]

It is orders of magnitude more difficult to make a game truly multithreaded than it is to make it single threaded. It could double a game's development time. Knowing Blizzard, they are going to support this game so well that no analogy will do it justice. Multi-threading will almost certainly be patched in if it doesn't come with the game launch a year from now.

 

[soccerballtux]

It is orders of magnitude more difficult to make a game truly multithreaded than it is to make it single threaded. It could double a game's development time. Knowing Blizzard, they are going to support this game so well that no analogy will do it justice. Multi-threading will almost certainly be patched in if it doesn't come with the game launch a year from now.

It most certainly won't be patched in. SMT is not something you usually "patch in", you can do it but if they won't do it for WoW, what makes you think they would do it for Starcraft? WoW needs it more than Starcraft will need it.

It does not 'double' a game's development time. I do not think you know what you are talking about it. It is more difficult, yes, but there are many ways to make something like SC scale to any number of cores.

 

[dguy6789]

It most certainly won't be patched in. SMT is not something you usually "patch in", you can do it but if they won't do it for WoW, what makes you think they would do it for Starcraft? WoW needs it more than Starcraft will need it.

It does not 'double' a game's development time. I do not think you know what you are talking about it. It is more difficult, yes, but there are many ways to make something like SC scale to any number of cores.

Id and Valve have patched in multi-threading into games that previously did not have it in the past with amazing success. Blizzard is bigger and more capable than either of them and has a history of unrivaled support for their products so why not?

I'd be inclined to believe you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. Ask any professional programmer how difficult multithreading is. Making a game multithreaded is one of the single most difficult things a game developer could ever be asked to do. Tim Sweeney and others have given speeches on how hard it is.

 

[Rhoxed]

Ran some replays at 1920x1080 everything absolutely maxed, 940BE with 3x4850's

AVG 65FPS MAX 103FPS MIN 42FPS using fraps and ~7 min replay

 

[Inspector Jihad]

Id and Valve have patched in multi-threading into games that previously did not have it in the past with amazing success. Blizzard is bigger and more capable than either of them and has a history of unrivaled support for their products so why not?

I'd be inclined to believe you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. Ask any professional programmer how difficult multithreading is. Making a game multithreaded is one of the single most difficult things a game developer could ever be asked to do. Tim Sweeney and others have given speeches on how hard it is.

valve's patched in multi-thread doesn't really work all that well and i like to think that they know what they're doing.

 

[invidia]

Id and Valve have patched in multi-threading into games that previously did not have it in the past with amazing success. Blizzard is bigger and more capable than either of them and has a history of unrivaled support for their products so why not?

I'd be inclined to believe you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. Ask any professional programmer how difficult multithreading is. Making a game multithreaded is one of the single most difficult things a game developer could ever be asked to do. Tim Sweeney and others have given speeches on how hard it is.

WoW wasn't multi-threaded until they released a patch. They have done it before and I noticed a bit of difference when that patch was released.

 

[dguy6789]

valve's patched in multi-thread doesn't really work all that well and i like to think that they know what they're doing.

It works fine from what I can tell. I've benchmarked TF2 with and without multithreading and the difference was as much as 50% higher for the minimum fps.

 

[I4AT]

I don't understand these multi-core numbers, the CPU utilization shows the game to be very lightly threaded, so where does the 20% performance increase come from when moving to quad core?

I think I'll wait for an AT preview.

 

[FallenHero]

I don't understand these multi-core numbers, the CPU utilization shows the game to be very lightly threaded, so where does the 20% performance increase come from when moving to quad core?

I think I'll wait for an AT preview.

I would assume because Starcraft starts to offload other minor background tasks as well as the computer being able to perform its normal functions without interrupting the game. That being said, I too will just wait for the AT preview, as they are very thorough and its easy to follow.

 

[soccerballtux]

It most certainly won't be patched in. SMT is not something you usually "patch in", you can do it but if they won't do it for WoW, what makes you think they would do it for Starcraft? WoW needs it more than Starcraft will need it.

It does not 'double' a game's development time. I do not think you know what you are talking about it. It is more difficult, yes, but there are many ways to make something like SC scale to any number of cores.

Id and Valve have patched in multi-threading into games that previously did not have it in the past with amazing success. Blizzard is bigger and more capable than either of them and has a history of unrivaled support for their products so why not?

I'd be inclined to believe you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. Ask any professional programmer how difficult multithreading is. Making a game multithreaded is one of the single most difficult things a game developer could ever be asked to do. Tim Sweeney and others have given speeches on how hard it is.

So what I'm trying to is, if they won't patch it in for WoW, it's really naive to think they're going to "patch it in" for SC2-- when they haven't even released SC2 yet (its a year away or whatever), and multithreading is the norm _now_. If they won't do it now, they're never going to do it.

 

[soccerballtux]

Id and Valve have patched in multi-threading into games that previously did not have it in the past with amazing success. Blizzard is bigger and more capable than either of them and has a history of unrivaled support for their products so why not?

I'd be inclined to believe you're the one who doesn't know what you're talking about. Ask any professional programmer how difficult multithreading is. Making a game multithreaded is one of the single most difficult things a game developer could ever be asked to do. Tim Sweeney and others have given speeches on how hard it is.

WoW wasn't multi-threaded until they released a patch. They have done it before and I noticed a bit of difference when that patch was released.

the main game code still isn't. I just read a blue post like, 2 days ago that I found while googling for this, but I can't seem to find it again-- but they said "the main game code will not ever be multi-threaded, that would require too much work and we're not going to do it-- what we did do was spawn a few extra threads for some simple, easily unwindable stuff like audio and...." and that's where my memory fades of the post. I'll see if I can't find it, but I can assure you it's not nearly as multithreaded as it could be. Or something-- because they said it's that way, and that they're not going to change that.

edit: yeah here you go found it: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=1778017311&sid=1&pageNo=17
post 324. ok, so "require complete rewrite....no immediate plans for it".

So to answer the question of how many CPUs WoW will actively use, it will run its primary thread on a single processor and offload sound and other minor threads to additional processors, but to a much more limited extent.

 

[soccerballtux]

I don't understand these multi-core numbers, the CPU utilization shows the game to be very lightly threaded, so where does the 20% performance increase come from when moving to quad core?

I think I'll wait for an AT preview.

I would assume because Starcraft starts to offload other minor background tasks as well as the computer being able to perform its normal functions without interrupting the game. That being said, I too will just wait for the AT preview, as they are very thorough and its easy to follow.

Hm, that's a good point I had not seen-- going from dual core multi to quad multi-threaded...still increases performance.
I don't understand how 8 threads, even if only at 1.6ghz, isn't enough for this game, unless the majority of the work gets done in one thread....but that doesn't explain why having 8 threads helps....this is confusing.

 

[IntelUser2000]

Little late post, but I think I know why it still scales with multiple cores despite CPU utilization graphs telling us otherwise.

The rather nice Athlon X2 and Core i7's performance and less than stellar showing of the Core 2's tell me its memory system bound. The two are still fairly close even with the Athlon X2 having 25% clock speed advantage, and Core i7's IMC probably opened up the bottleneck.

That said, caches still do matter. See how Core 2 Quad isn't any faster than Core 2 Duo yet on the i7, multiple cores scale well? Well, see it might be because of the anemic L2 cache size on the Core i7. If its running on 1 or 2 cores the L2 caches might be fully saturated. If you can offload even some not very intensive threads like sound and physics it would alleviate the pressure off the L2 cache of the main core. That would bring the single thread performance up.

Some interesting notes: While the first Starcraft could play on a lowly Pentium 90 PC, with 8 players and enough units I did encounter lag on my Pentium III 733MHz system I used to have.

 

[I4AT]

That's one theory, except we're seeing a 20% increase on the exact same CPU. All architecture is the same except for cores being disabled. Where have you seen Athlon X2 vs i7 vs C2D numbers? Only one CPU was tested in the linked preview and I've yet to see any others.