Sorry if this has been answered i have 27" imac i7 with 4gb ram it having some problems slowing down sometimes playing the game. I was thinking about adding more ram or just running it in windows 7 do you think it will help the performance.
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Will upgrading memory ram help performance for SC2
- Thread starter JSmoove05
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Most games are still 32-bit so they cannot utilize more than ~3.3GB of RAM. I would upgrade the RAM to 6GB or 8GB and yes, running them in Windows gives you significantly better performance.
SC2 plays fine (albeit at low settings) on my oldest machine, which probably defined the minimum spec (Core Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, X1600 with 128 MB). Of course, if you like leaving up a bunch of other programs while you play, the more RAM the merrier.
Your performance issues are probably the result of OS X 10.6.4 / driver / SC2 bugs, all video related. See the other threads here on SC2. While we wait for updates on at least one of those fronts, you'll likely see a bigger bump just by turning the video settings a step lower, or playing it in Windows.
EDIT: Though nobody with the recent iMacs (perhaps thanks to a slightly updated OS X / drivers?) appears to have that much of an issue....
Your performance issues are probably the result of OS X 10.6.4 / driver / SC2 bugs, all video related. See the other threads here on SC2. While we wait for updates on at least one of those fronts, you'll likely see a bigger bump just by turning the video settings a step lower, or playing it in Windows.
EDIT: Though nobody with the recent iMacs (perhaps thanks to a slightly updated OS X / drivers?) appears to have that much of an issue....
I have the same iMac with 8GB ram and experience no slowdowns or other strange behavior. I usually run at High settings, max resolution.
To be honest, I'd be surprised at any problems running it on 4GB. The CPU and GPU are both easily powerful enough. You are sure I suppose there is nothing intensive you are running in the background?
I do also play SC2 under Windows 7 64 bit (on the same hardware). Performance is somewhat better (only somewhat - people sometimes overstate this imho). For heat reasons I cap the framerate anyway though. The real reason I play under Windows is because of OSX mouse acceleration (not so good for "serious" play). Well, that and Windows is sort of my "gaming Mac".
I'd try Windows first if you have bootcamp set up already anyway. Or, just try dropping a few of your graphics settings. I believe (from memory) the shader setting is particularly heavy in terms of performance (my memory could be faulty on this though).
I should say, although I have not experienced this myself yet, even on fairly serious hardware some people report a little sluggishness when there are 200 supply armies running around and a Mothership is popping. If this is the situation you are talking about when you say "slow down", then pretty much everyone gets that.
Oh I should note for the record that because of widespread reports of graphics glitches, I am still running under 10.6.3 and not 10.6.4. No idea if that is a factor.
Yep.. same with me. I have the 27" iMac as well with 4GB ram running all settings on High and Max Resolution under OSX 10.6.4 and i only get slowdowns when there are a mass number of units on my screen. Does anybody know if this is just a game limitation or will it be fixed once we get better drivers?
BootCamp, running it virtualized would give you worse results than native.
Also before you start wondering about Windows try lowering shaders in settings, that gave me a nice boost.
SC2 and bootcamp..
I have an older 24" iMac - late 2006 ( 2.16Ghz C2D, 3G Ram - all that the chipset at the time will support - 7600 GT 256M vid card) and SC2 is playable via bootcamp + Win7 Ultimate on 'medium' settings. SC2 will not even finish loading before it crashes when in OSX (On the same machine)
I have an older 24" iMac - late 2006 ( 2.16Ghz C2D, 3G Ram - all that the chipset at the time will support - 7600 GT 256M vid card) and SC2 is playable via bootcamp + Win7 Ultimate on 'medium' settings. SC2 will not even finish loading before it crashes when in OSX (On the same machine)
I have a fairly recent iMac (3.06 GHz Core2Duo, 8800GS GPU 512 MB, 4 GB RAM) and the performance of SC2 is absolutely terrible. Very disappointed. I can run World of Warcraft on high settings at hundreds of frames per second on this Mac, but Starcraft 2 on anything but the very lowest settings slows it to a crawl. Even on low settings I get < 30 fps, when I turn on or increase any visual settings the game is unusable at < 10 fps. And on my recnt model MacBookPro, it literally gets hot enough to fry an egg on and the fans are so loud I can't hear the audio. I don't know if it's driver issues or what but I feel ripped off, not really the great experience I've come to expect from Blizzard over the years.
I am sorry to hear - but have you changed your screen resolution to just 1024x768 and give that a go?
Just curious and am disappointed to hear the performance issues too.
There's a bug with SC2 and current nVidia drivers. (10.6.3 supposedly works better than 10.6.4 too)
There are 2 solutions of tricking the installation nVidia beta drivers meant for mac pro or steal driver files one by one from latest iMac update using pacifist. (these might help a little but you could be risking of messing up your computer unbootable too)
As of now just set shaders to "low" and you should be good to play, some huge memory leak with the shaders if you set anything higher.
It does help to reduce the resolution, but it makes the game look terrible. And the performance still isn't great at any resolution.
There've been rumblings that an OSX graphics update is in the works which fixes the issues with 10.6.4 - you may be lucky and this will help.
I'd just play on a lower resn with the settings all on low. Hopefully it will run well enough for you to practice, and you can enjoy the graphical glitz when you get an OSX and/or hardware upgrade down the road.
EDIT: There is also a Bliz "blue" post which says there are know issues with inter alia the 8800. http://sea.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/26773211
I'd just play on a lower resn with the settings all on low. Hopefully it will run well enough for you to practice, and you can enjoy the graphical glitz when you get an OSX and/or hardware upgrade down the road.
EDIT: There is also a Bliz "blue" post which says there are know issues with inter alia the 8800. http://sea.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/26773211