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StarCraft 2 – Framerate issues and fix, burning graphics cards

I absolutely love this game but lately I have noticed my graphics cards just aren’t keeping cool. After some research with a friend we came across this forum post, but to summarise:

“Apparently, the game’s menu screens aren’t framerate-limited. This means that when there’s nothing else going on, your graphics hardware renders the bejeezus out of those screens…”

As the post says, you need to add the following lines to your variables.txt file in Documents\StarCraft II\variables.txt:

  • frameratecapglue=30
  • frameratecap=60

It will cap your framerate to around 60fps. To show you just how bad this issue is, I used FRAPS to show the framerate before and after the file edit:

Starcraft II - Mission Archives menu at 340 frames per second (Before)

Starcraft II - Mission Archives menu at 63 frames per second (After)

I don’t know whether this is operating system specific, but I do know that other menus such as Lab Upgrades causes the same issues. I had a friend FRAPS his game and he was experiencing the same crazy numbers as I was.

I run the game using the Ultra graphics setting across the board at 1920 x 1200 resolution; you may get different framerates for your system but no doubt the problem will occur regardless. Whether it affects Macs or not remains to be seen. My gaming system is as follows for your reference:

  • Intel Core2 Extreme 9650 quad core CPU
  • 2 x NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards, SLi capable
  • 4GB DDR2 RAM
  • 1TB hard disk space
  • Windows 7 OS

Blizzard has just released a new StarCraft II patch, version 1.0.1. Unfortunately it does not mention any fixes for graphical issues. Hopefully they will pick up on this soon.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 31st, 2010 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Games, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “StarCraft 2 – Framerate issues and fix, burning graphics cards”

  1. Aaron Faby Says:
    August 3rd, 2010 at 10:04 pm

    This seems to be fixed in 1.0.1, at least on the Mac. FMV cutscenes don’t go higher than 60fps and still scenes between missions don’t go over 30 fps.

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