Starcraft 2 cloud save game cross-platform?

[dunneh]

Hi all,

I'm well into the campaign mode on SC2 on my MacBook Pro but I have to say I'm a little underwhelmed by the performance under OSX (2.4ghz, 9600m gt).

As much as it pains me I'm tempted to try it under my XP bootcamp partition but before I do I was wondering if anyone knows that my Mac save game (attached to my battle.net account) will work under XP? I had read somewhere that SC2 supports cloud save games but can't see any reference as to whether this is cross-platform (like it is in in Steam).

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Dunneh

 

[Animalk]

I play the game on both my MBP in OSX and my PC in Win7. The cloud save works perfectly and I can play on either whenever I like.

 

[pauli123]

I just installed on a Macbook Pro (mid-2008) and a Win 7 PC and the cloud saves do NOT work for me. When I hit the load button, all I see is games I've saved on the particular platform I'm on. This is a bummer. Any suggestions?
-Pauli123

 

[hancock]

I am installing SC2 on my bootcamp partition for better performance, is there anything in particular I have to do to get cloud saves working or is it automatic?
thanks

 

[TMRaven]

saves work for me cross platform as well. I did not have to alter anything.

 

[pauli123]

saves work for me cross platform as well. I did not have to alter anything.

That's good news, at least! Hopefully just a bug for me. So you were able to play some missions on your Mac using OS X (not bootcamp), then continue where you left off on a PC?

 

[TMRaven]

Yeah I've switched between osx and windows a good 5 or so times today, and no problems.

 

[pauli123]

The scoop is - you can "continue" the campaign (after finishing a level), but the in level saved games cannot be opened by the other platform. Whew! At least that works!

 

[GustavPicora]

saves work for me cross platform as well. I did not have to alter anything.

I see you have an iMac 27''.. how does SC2 run on it?, what configuration do you have in the game?, Im thinking in buying the new 27'' released just this week, sop I wanna make sure all will be fine.

 

[TMRaven]

I see you have an iMac 27''.. how does SC2 run on it?, what configuration do you have in the game?, Im thinking in buying the new 27'' released just this week, sop I wanna make sure all will be fine.

You can max the game out at native resolution with the 5850m model. With the 4850m model, you'll either have to turn models down to 2d or shaders down to high, to get decent fps (30+) This is on windows. On osx side, the game runs horribly. Downing the resolution from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080 on osx side gives the biggest performance boost (10fps to 30fps with everything maxed out.) While on windows, downing the resolution from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080 only gains you 6fps.

 

[aznguyen316]

I just installed on a Macbook Pro (mid-2008) and a Win 7 PC and the cloud saves do NOT work for me. When I hit the load button, all I see is games I've saved on the particular platform I'm on. This is a bummer. Any suggestions?
-Pauli123

I think the cloud saves your latest auto save or whatever. If you manually save, that's a different story. But if you just you know regular quit from the campaign, that last save will be in cloud. I've gone back in forth between OSX and Win7 a few times and no problems.

 

[GustavPicora]

You can max the game out at native resolution with the 5850m model. With the 4850m model, you'll either have to turn models down to 2d or shaders down to high, to get decent fps (30+) This is on windows. On osx side, the game runs horribly. Downing the resolution from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080 on osx side gives the biggest performance boost (10fps to 30fps with everything maxed out.) While on windows, downing the resolution from 2560x1440 to 1920x1080 only gains you 6fps.

I see. it will be an i7 5750 the one I will get, but as far as Im reading the best shot will be to run it under bootcamp. pity pitty, so many "Genius engineers" at Apple and they aren't able to make a descent graphic driver.

 

[aki]

I just want to add, this whole "SC2 is unplayable under OSX" thing is hyperbole.

It's true that you get better performance under Windows (say 10-20%)?

But with a fast machine that difference may be trivial. Similarly, if you like your gaming with all the graphical bells n whistles your hardware is capable of, then Windows is the way to go probably; but if you just want to play the game, OSX performance is fine, honestly.

In my case, I actually game under both, depending on where I am at the time (on i7 iMac).

Yay for cloud saves.

My 2c.

 

[Superman07]

Not trying to take over the thread - although I think the OP was answered - but in a similar thread to the original question: can Mac and PC players play against each other? I've heard this alluded to, but I haven't seen anybody confirm it first hand. With everything handled by battlenet I believe this is possible, but I'd like to confirm.

 

[aki]

Absolutely they can. SC2 (as is the case with pretty much all Blizzard products) is entirely platform-agnostic. You can run it on OSX or Windows and it plays exactly the same (bar OSX performance obviously - bring on those new graphics drivers!) including multiplayer.

 

[Meever]

I just want to add, this whole "SC2 is unplayable under OSX" thing is hyperbole.

It's true that you get better performance under Windows (say 10-20%)?

But with a fast machine that difference may be trivial. Similarly, if you like your gaming with all the graphical bells n whistles your hardware is capable of, then Windows is the way to go probably; but if you just want to play the game, OSX performance is fine, honestly.

In my case, I actually game under both, depending on where I am at the time (on i7 iMac).

Yay for cloud saves.

My 2c.

Sounds more like double the performance. OSX needs to run it on lower resolution AND setting while Windows maxes the game out comfortably.

And it's fine on imacs I guess but on a 13" it's really not playable. Everything set to low and it still flounders about. I've never seen it hit over 30+ and the framerate consistently spikes up and down.

 

[goMac]

Perfectly playable on my machine with an 8800 on ultra settings (cept for textures, only a 512 meg card.) Sitting at a constant 30 fps.

I am currently running with a certain update, but I had similar performance under 10.6.3.

 

[UKBeast]

Perfectly playable on my machine with an 8800 on ultra settings (cept for textures, only a 512 meg card.) Sitting at a constant 30 fps.

I am currently running with a certain update, but I had similar performance under 10.6.3.

So the only problem is 10.6.4 ?

 

[TMRaven]

I just want to add, this whole "SC2 is unplayable under OSX" thing is hyperbole.

It's true that you get better performance under Windows (say 10-20%)?

But with a fast machine that difference may be trivial. Similarly, if you like your gaming with all the graphical bells n whistles your hardware is capable of, then Windows is the way to go probably; but if you just want to play the game, OSX performance is fine, honestly.

In my case, I actually game under both, depending on where I am at the time (on i7 iMac).

Yay for cloud saves.

My 2c.

For some of us, playing a game on a 1-2k dollar machine means maxing its graphics out. Doing so means 50% increase on windows. Not to mention that the gpus are easily overclockable on windows side.

 

[CptnJustc]

I just want to add, this whole "SC2 is unplayable under OSX" thing is hyperbole.

It's true that you get better performance under Windows (say 10-20%)?

But with a fast machine that difference may be trivial. Similarly, if you like your gaming with all the graphical bells n whistles your hardware is capable of, then Windows is the way to go probably; but if you just want to play the game, OSX performance is fine, honestly.

I don't think it's hyperbole, though it can be worked around and, as always, YMMV. Leaving my higher-end machines on their default settings after a while slows them to a crawl -- almost literally unplayable (looks like about 1-2 fps). Under Windows, I get a consistent smooth framerate (haven't measured, but it must be 30 fps or higher. On a straight comparison at default settings, that's a lot more than 10-20%.

Dropping them down to medium settings makes them very playable indeed, but that's a pretty sharp drop in technical performance. Ironically, my older laptop is much more playable at the default settings (they are, of course, set lower).

I seriously doubt that this is the typical modest Win-OS X performance disparity due to drivers or tuning, and can't wait for "a certain update"....

As far as the cloud saves, it seems to save your campaign progress, upgrade choices, etc., but not manual or even auto saves. If you want to port over one of those, you can copy the files from one machine to another (they're in your documents folder), but I haven't tried it between OSes.

 

[Mackilroy]

I do think it's hyperbole. With my machine under OS X I get a steady 50 FPS unless the entire screen is filled with explosions and ships and troops and whatnot – and in Windows the FPS would drop in the exact same situation. On my machine the difference in frames per second is only about fifteen percent, if not less.

 

[CptnJustc]

I do think it's hyperbole. With my machine under OS X I get a steady 50 FPS unless the entire screen is filled with explosions and ships and troops and whatnot – and in Windows the FPS would drop in the exact same situation. On my machine the difference in frames per second is only about fifteen percent, if not less.

I don't think anyone's claimed that it's a universal problem (it never is). Would be interested to hear, though... what are your machine, your OS, and your SC2 video settings?

 

[CptnJustc]

Somebody posted this very useful link in the "will it run?" thread:

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/224842575

I'm not sure how authoritative this blurb is, but it speaks to your (and my) performance issues, and to the possibility they'll be fixed in the relatively near future:

Right now, the Mac client is seeing some pretty major performance issues due to bugs with both the nVidia graphics drivers in 10.6.4. Snow Leopard, and a bug within Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty.

The Shaders, Lighting, Shadow options eat up all of the available video memory, or VRAM, very quickly. This results in the computer paging out to the standard RAM and to the Hard Drive to store the shader details, which is much slower than VRAM. This makes the game slow to a crawl.

I personally recommend capping the frame rate of Starcraft 2 so your computer doesn't overwork itself, wasting resources on the shaders, leaking all of the VRAM and overheating itself in the process. See below in "Things to Know Before Changing Any Settings" for more information on how to do this.

Blizzard, Apple, and nVidia are aware of these two issues, along with others, and are each working on fixes for their respective bugs.

For now, I recommend capping the frame rate of the game.

 

[Tkizzle007]

Why!!??? Starcraft 2 doesnt work?

Can anyone help me when i start the game the screen is black i can hear sound but when i max the screen i cant see anything??? Is my macbook too old??