Optimizing performance Hearthstone Linux

My first piece of advice would be to go into the video options and enable Multicore Processing. It's been my experience that this is disabled by default, and enabling it usually results in a performance boost. Despite being in the video settings, this is actually a CPU option.

My second piece of advice would be to make sure you have recent nVidia drivers installed.

Note: My system is a Core 2 Quad 6600 with an nVidia GT240 512MB GDDR5, so yours should outperform mine in anything that's not using a lot of CPU cores.

I don't know about a comprehensive guide, but I have a few suggestions.

First, as background, every setting is going to be geared towards balancing two different (and diametrically opposed) optimizations--that of speed in calculation, and size in memory. For instance, your texture quality, and to a lesser extent, model quality, will have a large memory usage with relatively minimal processing imprints, whereas your physics, shadows, and reflections will be rough on the CPU/GPU but in some cases have absolutely microscopic memory footprint. I'll call this Speed vs Size.

Your Size-heavy settings are going to increase load times between levels and eat up RAM, which would slow down other processes, but we'll assume you're running SC2 by itself. Your Speed-heavy settings are going to affect your FPS the most, and also have the most wow-factor.

So with that in mind, whenever I have to turn my graphics down because I'm playing tug-of-war (I usually run on Extreme:D ) I default everything to medium and then turn texture quality to high, shaders to high, reflections off, particle effects to low, physics to low, and Model Detail to high. If you hover your mouse over each option it will detail out what it does, and you can usually tell whether it will be more of a Speed sacrifice or a Size sacrifice, and if it's not clear-cut it's a mix of the two.

I did a test to show the difference, this is a shot of a replay on ultra, and this is a shot with the above settings. I started the match with about 80 fps on ultra and about 130 on the frugal settings, and around this point (tons of marauders, roaches, marines, and carriers) I was running around 40-50 on ultra and around 60-70 on frugal. As you can see, there's not a whole lot of difference in the stills, but it was noticeable enough--you can see the lack of motion trails on the interceptors, for example, and some of the explosions weren't as spectacular.

You shouldn't have a problem with that machine, but if you do, you can try these settings as a starting point, or try setting the various Speed settings even lower. You probably won't have to put the texture or model quality lower, as in general that will just affect load times and not so much the calculations.