Starcraft 2 and heroes of the storm on FX 8350
Starcraft 2 and heroes of the storm on FX 8350
Your insights on the chip performance across these titles are valuable. It seems you often see Extreme settings recommended, yet you still experience FPS drops even when playing on medium. The same applies to Heroes of the Storm. While the FX 8350 and R9 290 should handle it well at full settings, your system isn’t ideal. Still, it looks like a decent configuration overall. What others think?
I owned a PC with both the 8350 @ 5ghz and a 290. Unfortunately, Blizzard titles aren’t optimized well for such hardware. The 8350’s single-core performance is weak for gaming. Regrettably, this setup isn’t suitable for your needs.
I was curious about blizzard games since I haven’t faced any issues with other titles, generally running above 100 fps. Thanks for your feedback. By the way, I turned off some settings on my BIOS—disabled cool and quiet, activated HPC mode, and enabled performance mode in ez mode. Now I can play Heroes and Sc2 on Extreme without problems, though I’m not sure how it happened.
Blizzard titles usually rely heavily on the CPU. It might work better on systems with more GPU power than those focused on graphics.
I played both StarCraft 2 and HotS on a 6300 for several years, and it worked well. StarCraft isn’t even close to being unplayable at 30-40 fps, and I don’t recall HotS ever causing problems on that machine. That game was reliable. I did face some issues with Diablo 3. The problems were in specific spots of the game that many others also reported about. Those areas would turn into a slideshow whenever enemies began attacking, but once I left those spots it improved. Blizzard addressed a lot of those issues before I upgraded my rig. I’m aware that certain game settings can be tough on AMD hardware, so you won’t be able to run them at full "ultra" levels. Indirect Shadows in StarCraft 2, for example, completely crippled my performance on my 6300/270X system. I’d drop from an average of 30-40fps on higher settings to around 10 just by turning on Indirect Shadows.