How do I run Starcraft 2 on an Asus Eee PC netbook?

Question

I know it doesn't meet the minimum specs but there is a video of it working and I'm willing to delve into some workarounds to make this happen. It installed without error but gave a message about being below minimum specs (as expected.)

I upgraded the system memory to 2G and tried to attach the VGA cable to a external screen at 1024x768 but when I go into the game I get a "video unsupported" message by the display.

Can anyone provide steps/help to get this to run?

Answer 1

Sounds to me like your video card is outputting a signal/resolution not supported by your monitor. Assuming it's only losing the signal when you launch game, try tweaking the resolution manually:

in Documents/Starcraft II/Variables.txt

add...

width=1024
height=768

or whatever settings that you want to try.

Also, here are some other settings you can try tweaking in that file and see if you can gain some more performance:

foliagedensity (Default 0.750000)

It shows how dense the different foliage elements like grass, leaves will appear. You can decrease the value to something that fit your needs and also increase the performance of the game.

parallaxshadow (Default 1)

Parallax Shadows give depth to game textures and geometry at the expense of CPU/GPU performance. Switching it off by giving it ’0′ value may increase performance of the game.

particlelod (Default 3) particleobjects (Default 1.000000) particleterrain (Default 1.000000)

These three commands govern the quality of the particles in game. Lower the values to get performance boast.

shadowmapsize (Default 2048)

How shodows will be rendered in game, lowering this value to 1024/512 will increase the performance of the game and also take off some load on GPU and Ram.

TerrainTextureHiResCacheSize (Default 24) TerrainTextureLowResCacheSize (Default 50)

These two variables control the amount of memory the game uses to cache and stream textures high and low resolution textures separately.

TerrainTextureSize (Default 1024)

This is the memory of your graphic card, memory available at the disposal for the game to utilize.

transparentshadows (Default 1)

This is an eye candy tweak, if enabled it will give shadows a transparent touch enhancing colors in the process. Its OK to change the value to ’0′, its not something you need really. Infact, its an effect you will hardly notice while playing the game.

watercaustics (Default 1)

It makes the water look real, waves effects and splashes on the surface of water. Not required if you have low end GPU. Set this value to ’0′ to turn it off.

waterreflection (Default 1)

This variable enabled the reflection on the surface of water. Again, not required for people on low end graphic cards.

waterrendertargetsize (Default 1024)

How the game will render everything water, lower the value to boast performance.

Source: http://segmentnext.com/2010/08/07/starcraft-2-graphics-performance-tweak-guide/