[cookiesnmilk]

so i was wondering if there was a way to turn down starcraft 2's graphics lower than the normal game settings. ex. turn off shadows completely.

 

[McNinja]

This is your laptop correct?
Gateway® NV55C

Comes with this graphics card

ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 5470

ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5470 - NotebookCheck.net Tech

This site shows it gets around 102 FPS on starcraft 2 on low settings. I don't like this site because if you click on the numbers you see that they test on different laptop make and models with different driver versions per model. They just use the best model to represent the minimum, average and highest FPS.

Do you play with a nice laptop cooler. One with at least 2 120mm fans or a big 200mm fan like this one?

Cooler Master Notepal X3 Gaming Laptop / Notebook Cooling Pad Up to 17" (200mm Adj. Fan Speed)
$40

If you can spray out the dust in the ventilation side of the laptop that has the fan on top of the CPU/GPU. Use a can of compressed air, don't use a vacuum or something similar as they create static electricity.

This forum might help
How to turn off shadows completly? | StarCraft 2 | Nibbits

I turned GraphicsOptionShadowQuality=0
shadows=0
and the softshadow setting to 0

I got no shadows anymore and it resulted in a 5-10 fps boost at crowded times.

So yes shadows impact peformance greatly especially when ur in the 20-40 fps range.

It's sad i can only use medium shader on my geforce 7900 gto though

Its the variable.txt file you want to edit.