Problem with Starcraft 2 and Macbook Pro 13" Nvidia 320M

Question

Just got the newest 2.4Ghz 13" MBP with 320M video card.
Played Starcraft for about a week and started noticing severe issues:
1. sudden frame rate drop, then after about a week,
2. random tears and jagged lines over the screen when playing
This now almost happens every time the game is played on 1200x800 regardless of quality settings. When I change it to 1024x768, the problem goes away.
I'm guessing it might be a defective video card (transistors blown?).
What do you guys think, is it a hardware defect? I got this computer in Asia with receipt, will Apple stores in Canada honor the warranty? Please help!!

Answer 1

PowerBook 12 wrote:
I'm guessing it might be a defective video card (transistors blown?).
Well, from what you write it sounds as if the game has issues running at high resolution settings on your MacBook Pro 13".
NVIDIA GeForce 320M uses an integrated chipset graphics card with the Core 2 Duo CPU. It lacks dedicated graphics memory but uses the systems main memory instead (in Mac OS X 256 MB from the main memory). Performance is not as good as 15" or 17" MacBook Pro which have dedicated GPU with memory. So you may well find that games perform best at lower lower than the max 1280x800 for the laptop.
If you think you have a hardware issue with your MacBook Pro 13" then run the Apple hardware test (AHT), procedure is listed in your laptops end-user documentation. If it fails AHT then Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service provider are the way to proceed (Apple laptops come with a one-year world wide warranty). But if it passes and your graphics issue is specific to SC2 then you have isolated an issue with the game running on your laptop.
If an issue with the game running in OS X I would definitely check that the laptop firmware and OS X are up to date, Apple recently issued an OS X graphics update that fixed some SC2 issues, and also regularly issues OS X updates to fix known issues we are at (OS X 10.6.4).
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4286
Give your feedback to Blizzard customer support about game performance under OS X. Finally, I would bear in mind that Blizzard release OS X and Windows versions of SC2, so it may be worth trying the game run in Windows by Bottcamp on the laptop and seeing if game performance improves (this is also a good test for whether you have a hardware or software issue here).