I keep lagging out of Starcraft II games, even though I am (moderately) certain my network is just fine, I'm on a university campus.
I am however lacking in system specs, specifically my graphics card. I'm not sure how or why this would affect my game connection. My motive is two fold, I'm curious as to how this works and also I would really love to play some freaking Starcraft.
Some details:
Macbook pro.
2.16GHz intel core 2 duo.
3GB DDR2 ram.
ATY Radeon X1600 128mb
EDIT: I thought about posting this on Superuser but their FAQ told me not to post a question about video games so hopefully this was the right place to come
Best Answer
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.