Best Video Card for Starcraft 2

[palmer]

About a year ago I bought a GTX460 and it seems like it has died on me, so it's time for a new one. The only game I play anymore is Starcraft 2 in Wine, so I don't really care about anything else. I've noticed that the game drops below 30fps in larger battles, so I was considering getting something faster, according to the VGA charts at TomsHardware, a 560 ti seems to fit my bill well. The performance of my computer is adequete for everything else, so it's just Starcraft 2 that I'm worried about.

I guess I'm wondering:

Does anyone have experience with the 5xx series cards and linux (ideally SC2 in Wine, but that might be pushing it)?

Should I even bother to upgrade or just save the $50 and stick with a 460 (I have a "AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 955 Processor" (not overclocked to 3.2GHz), which I don't think is all that great)? Should I just bite the bullet and get a new CPU? (and if so, what would run SC2 well?)

I would love to go all open-source (it's just this and VirtualBox, but I could probably get away with the OSE version), does anyone have experience running the open-source AMD drivers with Wine and SC2?

Thanks!

[krinn]

if you're about to buy that kind of card just to play 1 game, isn't it just cheaper to keep your current card and buy a windows copy to run that game in conditions it was suppose to run ? I don't know anything about SC2, but it looks a bit odd your current video card isn't enough to run it.

[dwbowyer]

@krinn: Your reading comprehension skills need a brush up.

[krinn]

[palmer]

[arterius]

I guess you have already tried all tricks on the winehq page for sc2. Some people report nice improvements because of cpu affinity among other things.
I always feel that my cpu is to slow (E6600@3,0Ghz) and my 460gtx is not the reason for low fps.

What resolution do you play in ?

I would personally go for the bigger card.

[StringCheesian]

You could try openbenchmarking.org, it's searchable.

For example, here are some benchmarks involving an nVidia 580 GTX: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1102288-IV-1102285IV13

[Desti²]

GTX460 is running well for SC2, you should check your graphics settings, especially shader and terran should not be too high. Also turn off vsync in the game settings, it makes the game feeling much slower on my system.
When you complain about slow battles in 4v4 with two 800 armys, it doesn't matter what kind of PC you have, the game engine can't handle that much units smooth.
_________________
Linux Users Everywhere @ climateprediction.net

[palmer]

[darklegion]

A better GPU is unlikely to help. Performance is bad because the conversion between Direct3D and OpenGL is slow. A faster CPU will help, however, I can't really say how much a better AMD (or overclocked AMD) processor would help. A SandyBridge setup (e.g i5 2500k) should result in decent gains (especially if you overclock) but I'm not sure it would be worth upgrading everything just for this one game. There's also AMD's new Bulldozer lineup that should be released in a few months or so, which may (or may not) be better than SandyBridge.

Oh and for a quick test, you could overclock your current processor and see much more FPS you gain. It should give you an idea of whether or not a better CPU will be useful. My minimum FPS for oblivion was raised by 5-10 fps from overclocking my E5200 from 2.5ghz to 3.5ghz, which is quite decent.

One more thing, performance of wine is not usually affected by texture quality or resolution and stuff like that, so if you have a good card, you can pump those settings up (Including the OpenGL quality setting in nvidia-settings). Shadow and lighting effects can have an effect, some of the time, but often at a large image quality cost. I usually play games with maximum settings, as turning them down often doesn't make a worthwhile difference.

[darklegion]

I've found that "UseGLSL = disabled" gives me a 5-10 minimum FPS gain with most games. Could be enough to get you acceptable performance with your current setup (and a new video card of similar strength)

[nukem996]

My system has an Intel i7 Sandybridge 8G of RAM and an evga geforce 570 GTX. I can play SC2 on max settings(yes everything) with no lag. You may want to look into the 560 that just came out. Its cheaper then the 570 but still pretty powerful.

[darklegion]

It's your CPU that is making the main difference nukem996, you have an i7. There's little point in getting a powerful video card if wine (and thus the CPU) is bottlenecking it.

BTW do you play any other games nukem? I'd be interesting in seeing what sort of performance you get for heavier games like the Witcher 1/2, Oblivion, Crysis etc. I've been thinking of getting an i5/i7 but am not sure if the performance increase will be great enough for it to be worthwhile.

[nukem996]

heh I'm just finishing up college so I havn't had time to play many games. I got this machine mostly for virtualization during class and gaming when I'm done. I can play Heros of Newerth, any source based game, or Civ IV at max. I'm planning on getting into Crysis when I graduate.

BTW my gf plays Oblivion at full settings on her machine(Intel Q6600 Gefore 8800 GTS) so I assume I could as well.

[darklegion]

[darklegion]

[j_c_p]

Hello here,

I have about (20~50)fps /high settings (1680x1050) after reading the useful topic thread in the WineHQ Starcraft II page.

[darklegion]

Yeah, "UseGLSL = disabled" does give quite a decent performance boost on most D3D games. It even allows games like the Witcher 2 to work, that don't yet work properly with "UseGLSL = enabled".

Oh and one more thing. Although I'm not sure if this was just something else on my system causing issue, I found that enabling CONFIG_SCHED_AUTOGROUP=Y with the stock CPU scheduler (CFS) resulted in a performance drop with wine, compared to CFS without it (and BFS for that matter). So if you have that setting enabled with your kernel, you might want to try without it (or try BFS).