Hello,
I have the strangest issue in Starcraft 2. I have noticed a problem while playing that the game is not as smooth as it should be, but I wasn’t sure if I am seeing things or not. Today I was able to replicate the problem and now I know that repeatedly changing between groups (1234;1234;1234, you know) causing unit respond sounds significantly slows down my game and my FPS drop low. The game runs perfectly smooth in big fights, high unit count if only I am not using control groups at all or I have sound disabled/unit response sound disabled. I have tried a lot of things but nothing worked. While this issue is barely noticable in the earlygame, in the later stages this gets unplayable.
After failing with disabling every audio device, reconnecting headphones, toying around with the audio settings I couldn’t find any solution. In the end I have decided to completly reinstall Windows 10 from the scratch and after downloading Starcraft 2 again, the issue still persists. Please help me find a solution so I can play my beloved game.
To help you ilustrate the issue:
-
Sound disabled, spamming hotkeyes = no changes to the FPS
-
Sound enabled, spamming hotkeyes = FPS drop, you can feel small stutters ingame
-Sound enabled, not spamming hotkeyes = no changes to the FPS.
I have gifs, but I can’t post links in here. I wanted to post DxDiag here immediately but then it says my post is too long.
You can find my DxDiag on pastebin dot com / NqWCdkxB
To save us time before you suggest me to turn it off, I have already disabled all windows “capture in the background”, Xbox game bar and game modes settings. This didn’t fix the issue.
I hope you can help,
MaNa
1 Like
Did you check your window build?
If you have window 10 build 20H1 or 20H2
Response sound fps drop will continue.
So roll back your windows10 to build 1909.
I was suffering like you
But roll backed to build 1909, response sounds stuttering has gone.
Hi,
I can confirm i spent and returned much hardware early 2020 due to this issue. I pinned it down to latency i think between the windows builds. He is correct about the stuttering being “fixed” when you revert the windows build. however, is there solution other than this?
Kind Regards
Stephen
There are a few things you can try to see if they improve this issue caused by sound.
- Switch to Windowed mode
System > Graphics > Display Mode > Windowed
- Disable Reverb
System > Sound > Reverb > Disabled
- Lower sound channels
System > Sound > Sound quality > Low
If the issue persists, please upload your system files to pastebin.com and reply with the links to the files using the preformatted text option to encapsulate the links.
Hey,
Thanks for taking the time to look into this. I tried the reverb and sound channels again as it was my first thought as well as working with new audio drivers/older drivers. Not clearing up the problem.
The issue is visably clear with sound on vs off. What sys files in particular would you need dxdiag?
Best Regards
MSINFO is usually a little clearer for some things, but both would be good as they both have pros and cons in terms of what we look at.
If you don’t feel comfortable submitting them here on the forum you can always reach out to our Customer Support team (mention this forum post too if you want so they see what you’ve done): Contact Support - Blizzard Support
Hello, MaNa. Good to see a programer in the forums.
The problem you are experimenting is a bug/glitch who have a lot of time in the game. its caused for the voises of the units, specifically the “response sounds”. When you switch control groups, the framerate will decrease to 30 or 40, but without it being reflected in the game’s fps counter. To “solve” this problem you have to deactivate the “Voices” and “Response Sounds” of the Sound Option Menu.
I dont know if there is another solution for this. I already did A LOT of things and this is the only way to solve the problem, at the cost of not hearing the voices of the units.
Thanks,
Ignacio
Hi Guys,
I can confirm that the issue is related to sounds. (Ctrl+S) vs on/off is a massive difference. There is not a workaround i found other than going back to a very old build of windows as suggested prior.
Here is the SysInfo. I can work further with you on this and i will be testing Rescue’s idea above to determine if it works for myself.
------ UPDATE ---------
Hi Ixthocaesil,
Yeah i tried updating to 21h1 windows as i heard it made other game performance much better. however, i will add it does nothing for the bug i explained above. The previous fix mentioned by Rescue does reduce the stutter though.
I do think its windows/Sc2 related for the most part as 17XX versions of windows do not have this problem at all (for me and others) and its clearly linked to sound and audio. Sadly does not matter if you lower or higher the audio bitrates or quality.
Thanks for helping so far, its sad though. New GPU and setup, and cannot play a game that ran butter smooth early 2011 : ). I do miss Sc2 gaming
^^
It might be worth trying out the latest windows updates as there were some updates related to gaming issues specifically caused by a previous update.
Or they will be available “soon”. 
push… any type of fix yet? problem is still the same.
2 Likes
Bump, does anyone have a solution to this? Still happening with latest windows version
Hello all,
Sounds like (pun intended) the problem is still ongoing. If it’s still happening and being “solved” by either :
- disabling the sound
- disabling the unit response sound
- reverting to a previous Windows build (1909 and earlier)
Please reply to this threadand with preferably your MSinfo and DXdiag files. You can post them here using the preformatted text for a better visibility. If it doesn’t fit, you can host the files on an external site such as Pastebin then provide the URL here, also in a preformatted text.
Still having the problem, disabling sound fixes the problem and so does reverting to windows 1909, neither of which is ideal since old windows versions have incompatibility with AMD drivers and causes crashes.
dxdiag here:
https://pastebin.com/PMycD8gr
MSInfo here, split into 2 pastebins:
https://pastebin.com/eMpjJUnL
https://pastebin.com/GDBm7KNz
I’m experiencing a problem as well, but while tinkering with settings while monitoring frametimes I’m getting while spamming control groups, I made an interesting discovery:
The stuttering doesn’t occur with response sounds enabled if voices volume is set really low. I’ve found 3% voices volume at 100% master volume to be where this starts to happen. Same for 100% voices volume at 3% master volume and various steps in between.
If you can deal with setting overall system volume very high and lowering the volume of everything else this is a solid workaround imo. That said, if anyone is going to look into fixing the root cause of this, good luck because the issue seems bizzare.
DxDiag
https://pastebin.com/HMFcEZWM
msinfo (Windows Error Reporting section from the very bottom was cut out because all the application errors dating back 6 months were 4.5MB of text)
https://controlc.com/e01fca8c
Bumping this again, and thanks for the 3% volume fix, seems to work very well! MaNa posted recently on twitter that it can be fixed with Nvidia cards by going into the Nvidia control panel, and in Manage 3D settings changing Low Latency mode to Ultra. Sadly I have an AMD card so this won’t work for me, and there is no equivalent setting in the AMD software (i’ve tried everything). Hopefully this gets fixed some day, but likely not.