Starcraft 2 Lag Spikes

[Enhancelogic]

I'm trying to figure out where my lag spikes are coming from when playing Starcraft 2 and maybe the good people of AnandTech can help me out.

All settings Ultra with no AA
Phenom II x4 965 BE
2 gigs of ram Kingstons Hyper x DDR3 1600
Ati 5770
asrock m3a770de (motherboard)
1920x1080 resolution


I'm assuming it's the ram since 94% of the memory is used up during game play at the most intense battles while the CPU usage never really gets past 80%. What do you guys think? I also tried overclocking my CPU to 3.9 but that didn't help either.

 

[darkewaffle]

2GB of RAM certainly could be holding you back, though another possibility is your internet 😛

There's two kinds of lag, visual and network. Visual is usually characterized by drops in FPS, or freezes where nothing is moving at all.

Network lag acts differently, your app will stop responding but usually everything is still being rendered; so your characters are "idling" if that makes sense. Standing still but still animated.

Does that make sense? And which more accurately describes what you see?

 

[Enhancelogic]

I'm very familiar with lag spikes being either cause by my computer or the internet and it's most certainly a FPS lag spike. The reason being is my screen would freeze for about 1 second. Actually, it's less then 1 second. In this one second, I would not be able to move around the map as opposed to an internet lag spike.

 

[Wizlem]

I would say ram. Pauses like you describe are most likely waits on the HDD because there isn't enough RAM. I would think anything else causing lag would be general slowness and not spikes. Unless of course something taxing suddenly hits the screen.

 

[mfenn]

I'm very familiar with lag spikes being either cause by my computer or the internet and it's most certainly a FPS lag spike. The reason being is my screen would freeze for about 1 second. Actually, it's less then 1 second. In this one second, I would not be able to move around the map as opposed to an internet lag spike.

I would try some "skirmish" (to the extent that you can in SC2, lol) games to confirm. Just load up one of those custom maps that lets you spawn a bunch of units. I believe that if you load the map directly from the map editor, then you will be as "offline" as possible with SC2. This will let you eliminate any possibility of network latency AND give you a controlled environment to test in.

Anyway, after that wall o' text, I must say that it's probably your 2GB of RAM. Does the hard drive start working really hard during the "spike"? If you're swapping, performance will go into the toilet.

 

[Davidh373]

Probably RAM, very unlikely, but could Graphics card.

 

[Crusty]

You didn't mention your OS but if you're newer than XP you can run the 'Resource Monitor' to get a more advanced view of whats going on in your system. Running that while playing SCII should give you some more data to work with.

 

[Enhancelogic]

I would try some "skirmish" (to the extent that you can in SC2, lol) games to confirm. Just load up one of those custom maps that lets you spawn a bunch of units. I believe that if you load the map directly from the map editor, then you will be as "offline" as possible with SC2. This will let you eliminate any possibility of network latency AND give you a controlled environment to test in.

Anyway, after that wall o' text, I must say that it's probably your 2GB of RAM. Does the hard drive start working really hard during the "spike"? If you're swapping, performance will go into the toilet.

Thanks. I'll try.

You didn't mention your OS but if you're newer than XP you can run the 'Resource Monitor' to get a more advanced view of whats going on in your system. Running that while playing SCII should give you some more data to work with.

I'm using vista and I don't know how to use resource manager. Any tips on how I would go about recording data? I managed to load it up but not sure where to go from there. It looks like it's giving me the same info as Task manager but with an added option to record data. So I'm assuming I should record some data. I'll try it.

 

[Athadeus]

XP also has resource manager. It provides incredibly more information than task manager. You want to find where it shows you the data for Average Disk Queue Length to see if memory is what is hurting you. I'm not sure that Vista has the same resmon layout as Windows 7, but for me it is under the Disk tab, Storage section.

You should also try turning your graphics settings down to all medium and see if that resolves it, or if you notice the performance improve in other ways you may not have expected. That is the most easy to do, and you might be surprised.

I upgraded from a Core 2 duo e6300, 2x1gb ram, HD4770 because of a multitude of SC2 performance issues, including the short freezes (which I was able to resolve before upgrading by turning down the graphics settings).