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Hi all, apologies if this is the wrong place to post this but I'm really just looking for some help and my google skills have pretty much failed me at this point.
I recently bought a new PC from a friend, as my old PC pretty much had a dinosaur as it's first owner and I needed a small upgrade. Since playing on the new PC I've found it almost possible to play any matchup past the 15-20 minute mark due to massive framerate drops in big battles/once a ton of units are on the map. Naturally this makes the game completely unplayable against zerg regardless of how long the game's been going and I just have to leave the game right at the start. I initially thought that it may have something to do with standing on creep (which does make it worse), but the problem pretty much extends to any kind of big battle.
All of my settings are on the lowest possible setting, reverb is disabled in sound, etcetc. and my graphics are set to 16bit. All of these attempted fixes have done nothing and it's really ruining my enjoyment of the game at this point because I'm essentially forced to win within the first 10 minutes. If someone could please take a look at the below specs and offer some advice that would be great - as I'm sure this PC shouldn't be struggling as much as it is (I am aware it's not amazing, but sc2 actually ran better on my old machine!)
Specs: OS: Windows 8.1 Processor: AMD A6-5200 APU with Radeon HD Graphics (2.00 Gh/z) RAM: 8GB DDR3 Graphics card: not applicable, see processor (built-in).
Thanks for any help that you guys can offer.
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I wouldnt even call this a computer integrated GPU = RIP
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The game becomes increasingly cpu bound as time goes on... it's likely your old processor had significantly faster lightly threaded performance (sc2 doesn't scale [appreciably] beyond 2 physical cores) as your "new" one is very poor.
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United Kingdom20145 Posts
Yep^
That's a Jaguar CPU too. They're a few year old CPU's designed for passively cooled tablets and cheap, low power laptops (where almost all of the cost is the OS and the screen, laptop shell, RAM, HDD etc - and almost nothing spent on CPU+GPU)
Your old system was probably just faster. A midrange core 2 duo from 2006 era would be faster in this case, though both are technically very low performance by todays standards
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On July 01 2015 00:54 Cyro wrote: Yep^
That's a Jaguar CPU too. They're a few year old CPU's designed for passively cooled tablets and cheap, low power laptops (where almost all of the cost is the OS and the screen, laptop shell, RAM, HDD etc - and almost nothing spent on CPU+GPU)
Your old system was probably just faster. A midrange core 2 duo from 2006 era would be faster in this case, though both are technically very low performance by todays standards For context, a trip down memory lane. One benchmark doesn't say much and you should look at a variety of things, but check Cinebench R10 single-threaded. http://anandtech.com/bench/CPU/38
A6-5200 scores 1986.
For reference: *** Athlon 64 X2 5200+: 2428 From 2006, on 90 nm. Older models in the series (and Athlon 64 in general) predate Core 2 Duo and last represent AMD CPU performance superiority over Intel.
Core 2 Duo E4500: 2500 From 2007, lower-cost version of Conroe (2006), original Core 2 Duo gen.
Atom 330: 675 From 2008, Intel's original iteration of low power, low cost cores.
Phenom II X4 955: 3675 From 2009, about the last AMD series of chips worth recommending for gaming builds.
Core i3 530: 3878 From 2010, used to be cheaper than Phenom II X4 (quad core) but more expensive than Phenom II X2 (dual core) from AMD.
Core i5 2400: 5423 From 2011, real separation by Intel from Sandy Bridge (the Core i3 2100 gets 5094, a big step up from the i3 530).
E-350: 1174 From 2011, AMD's first generation of low power, low cost "cat" cores (Jaguar being from this line).
FX-8350: 4338 From 2012, the last of AMD's high-end desktop chips other than the FX-9xxx later that just took the same thing and cranked power levels to 11.
Celeron J1900: 1917 From 2013, Intel's first real architectural refresh of the low-power Atom cores running at low-power desktop/laptop power levels, lower power than the A6-5200 but kind of comparable.
A10-7850K: 4273 From 2014, latest AMD CPU architecture, here in a top-end APU config for desktop.
Pentium G3420: 6235 From 2014 (minor speed bump of same thing available in 2013), Intel's low-end dual core from the previous gen.
Core i7-4790K: 8785 From 2014, Intel's previous generation but fastest because of highest clock speed, top config. *** Though for what it's worth, Jaguar cores power the Xbox One and PS4. Just realize that it's about 10+ years old in terms of single-threaded desktop CPU performance, so for SC2. That's what you get for a chip that's a bit dated that is designed for low power and space. Power levels at the A6-5200 level are much too high for fanless tablets; you'd have to look at Jaguar models with half the clock speed or so to make that more feasible.
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United Kingdom20145 Posts
Though for what it's worth, Jaguar cores power the Xbox One and PS4
They have 2x 4 core jaguar CPU modules in there with an API way better than dx11 (and sc2 uses dx9) with very explicit care to make everything as CPU light and threaded as possible, to cut costs there and take advantage of other hardware to make games look pretty though often at lower framerates (several ps4 AAA games that are 30fps locked actually spend a lot of time at 20-25fps and that's just casually accepted)
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So from the info I'm getting on here I'd probably be better with, at the very least, a new CPU. I might just go for a whole new build entirely on payday. Thanks for the help all!
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