POTENTIAL REASONING:
In my experience with Modern Warfare 2, the program behind the game waits for certain conditions to be met before it sends off a packet across the network. For example, if your graphics card is taking too long to draw a frame, the program may wait for that frame to be finished before it sends or reads the next network packet. In addition, some drivers may choose to offload processing to the CPU if it detects that it is too much to finish in the allotted time.
I would ask: Are you the only one experiencing the lag or do others see you lag as well?
When my external harddisk takes a long time to write data, my network card stops transmitting until the other synchronized processes are finished.
This is best explained if you consider the case in which you are the host: as host, it is your responsibility to synchronize all the other players. However, if you are taking a long time to finish the computation processes, you will create lag even though your network connection is not being overloaded.
Ping is calculated not by the congestion on the network, but by how long it takes for you to respond to a packet. While the most noticeable source of intermittent delay is network congestion (bad connection), in your case it is probably processing delay, that is, your computer just can't keep up with the frequency of messages.
Hope this helps.
POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS:
If you are playing the native version of Starcraft II, I would suggest that you make sure your OSX is at version 10.6.3 (roll back or update as necessary) and try playing on the minimum settings. If you are playing on bootcamp with the PC version, I would suggest looking into overclocking your gfx card or updating the drivers. Bootcamp is known to underclock gpu's in order to maximize battery life.
Typically, I find cross platform games have better performance on the Windows version as opposed to the Mac versions. If you look at what Blizzard's recommended specifications are:
PC Recommended Specifications:
- Dual Core 2.4Ghz Processor
- 2 GB RAM
- 512 MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX or ATI Radeon® HD 3870 or better
Mac Recommended Specifications:
- Intel® Core 2 Duo processor
- 4 GB system RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT or ATI Radeon® HD 4670 or better
PCs require less powerful components than Macs do. From this, I would assume Starcraft 2 runs better on Windows than on Mac.
Best Answer
Try CMD+Tab, CMD+M, or CMD+H.