[HOWTO - RAMDRIVE] Increasing SWTOR System Performance

[LordHartigan]

Thanks you for this thread. I would like to see if anything on the op works but am afraid I just don't have the knowledge to follow some of the directions. Like using the ImDisk or even installing directx9. My computer says I have a later version and won't allow me to install it. I don't suppose there are some more detailed step by step instructions for this out there?

[Gerandar]

Man, you would have gone insane during DOS days if you had a Sound Blaster ISA Card.

 

The difference is its 2012 now, DOS is done with. if we were still using DOS I could understand.

[hunterknows]

my swtor told me i didnt have the required amount of cpu but i later found out i needed more ram my ram is 896mb and im running a emachines xp so im buying more ram this weekend 2gb but my problem is i cant move i load up my game (takes 30 min) and then i get in and i cant move. This is my first mmo and i dont know alot about computers plz help!!!!!

[Krumple]

Did you setup the ramdisk manually or used the all-in-one batchscript? If you used the batchscript, please run it as administrator.

 

Anyway the problem lies somewhere in the local SWTOR folder that is not renamed (batchscript) or you did not copy settings to installpath/swtor/retailclient/, in case of the manual way.

 

I set it up manually and you were right. When I was typing everything out I forgot the "x" on the program files (x86) and it wasn't recognizing the path although I wasn't noticing any errors except for the lack of saving. Once I looked over the bat file and noticed the missing "x" I put it in and fired up the game and whalla all my settings were how they should be.

 

Thankx for the response, it was helpful.

[Lemon_King]

All right, looks like people I know have stopped playing and I really haven't logged in awhile.

So I'm tossing the reigns of the thread to Ocmer.

 

 

No hard feelings.

 

 

my swtor told me i didnt have the required amount of cpu but i later found out i needed more ram my ram is 896mb and im running a emachines xp so im buying more ram this weekend 2gb but my problem is i cant move i load up my game (takes 30 min) and then i get in and i cant move. This is my first mmo and i dont know alot about computers plz help!!!!!

Ouch, yeah it looks like your machine is a good bit out of date.

More ram may help, but not knowing your Graphics Card or CPU the gain is unknown.

 

The difference is its 2012 now, DOS is done with. if we were still using DOS I could understand.

Its still used. >_> Edited March 7, 2012 by Lemon_King

[Ambroshus]

Just wanted to thank you for all the effort everyone have put in to helping those with slow FPS. Just wanted to let you know that this all-in-one batch file gave me a 400% increase in performance. Unfortunately the increase was from 2fps to 8fps in WZ's. i can still PVE with around 25-30FPS so i will at least continue for the moment and hope something happens. you guys are saviors to a lot of people and i applaud you for your efforts. Good luck in what ever direction you now head.

 

x2-4200 athlon

hd6770-1g

8g ddr2

win7

[mandelmatt]

I havent seen much of a fps icnrease but a performance increase overall HOWEVER

 

when i do KP-HM especially bonethrasher i go from 15-20fps to 3-5fps. Ive setup the ramdrive with cache and fx. I have about another 1000-1500meg i can dedicate to the ramdrive. I am trying to figure out what files are being accessed during KPHM so i can put those to RD and see if i get improvements. What program are you using to see which files are being accessed while in a zone?

 

also thanks for all your work on this, everyone has done a great job and this si well worth it

[---Katsumoto---]

I am using the latest All-in-one script and it works perfect. I was really wanting the mount script that will run this at windows start. Do you have a link to it? I can't seem to find the latest version of that.

 

Thanks so much.

Edited March 8, 2012 by ---Katsumoto---

[Jeskelech]

@OP

 

So what you are telling me is that, in order to increase SW:Tor performance I have to do two things.

 

1) Buy a new computer with 6GB of RAM or more, preferebly SSD as well.

2) Install a ramdrive to compensate for caching.

 

I think I'll just wait for BW to make some fixes to the engine....

Edited March 8, 2012 by Jeskelech

[mandelmatt]

lol. he isnt telling you anything. Hes merely trying to help, and help he did. Bioware has issues with their coding, its highly inefficient. This is a BANDAID, a workaround until they get off their butts and fix it. You dont INSTALL anything, u make a virtual drive using your ram. Maybe you didnt understand the OP's intent

 

 

@OP

 

So what you are telling me is that, in order to increase SW:Tor performance I have to do two things.

 

1) Buy a new computer with 6GB of RAM or more, preferebly SSD as well.

2) Install a ramdrive to compensate for caching.

 

I think I'll just wait for BW to make some fixes to the engine....

[Jeskelech]

I did understand the intent, but I couldn't help being sarcastic about it, as the game is supposed to be min specced to a Win XP with 2GB of Ram and a 2.66 GHz Quadcore, now I am also just assuming that under all these specs falls regular old fashioned HDDs etc.

 

What I am really saying is that I am expecting the SW to be able to run, and run well on minimum specs at full screen max resolution, but minimum settings, which should be assumed at 1920 x 1050 these days, the 1024 by 768 monitors are long gone.

 

Essentially the help only really covers the high end of the machines out there, and as such, even if well intended, isn't really much help for a large part of the playerbase.

Edited March 8, 2012 by Jeskelech

[Imasithbanana]

You can use Process Explorer and Process Monitor

 

I would guess that its more items in the Assets folder looking at the names though nothing stands out as being Specific to KP or PvP but I'm sure it pulls from many of those files.

 

I havent seen much of a fps icnrease but a performance increase overall HOWEVER

 

when i do KP-HM especially bonethrasher i go from 15-20fps to 3-5fps. Ive setup the ramdrive with cache and fx. I have about another 1000-1500meg i can dedicate to the ramdrive. I am trying to figure out what files are being accessed during KPHM so i can put those to RD and see if i get improvements. What program are you using to see which files are being accessed while in a zone?

 

also thanks for all your work on this, everyone has done a great job and this si well worth it

Edited March 8, 2012 by Imasithbanana

[Ocmer_]

I am using the latest All-in-one script and it works perfect. I was really wanting the mount script that will run this at windows start. Do you have a link to it? I can't seem to find the latest version of that.

 

Thanks so much.

 

Ah sorry, forgot to create the url.

 

It is fixed now, or here is the direct link.

[---Katsumoto---]

Ah sorry, forgot to create the url.

 

It is fixed now, or here is the direct link.

 

You're the man! Thank you so much for all your hard work on this project. Since upgrading to 3 HD7970's in trifire, getting SSD's and now this fix, I am running everything in the game maxxed out with 8x AA and full shadows and never droppping below 90fps. Except on the fleet but still getting +60fps with this batch fix. You have really made the game more enjoyable for me.

 

Thank you Ocmer!

[Blackmambo]

Also want to say a big thanks for this - my rig is a i5 3.2ghz, 8gb ram, win7 64bit and a Radeon HD 6870.

I went from 30-50 fps with all on low/off in pve solo enviroment to 50-90 with everything but AA and shadows on HIGH. Shadows is off and AA is off, due to i play a lot of pvp

 

In wz i went from 15-30 fps with everything on low/off to 30-40 with everything on high.

 

Resolution is 1600*900 all the time.

 

And the fun went up by a million

 

Still going to buy a better gfxcard tho and a SSD drive soon. But untill then, awsome fix!

[FallenKerish]

Is there anyway to "RAMDRIVE" only the file swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor to increase performance? If so, how do you do it? I'm sorry I'm a major noob when it comes to this.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. I love playing this game but I just can't play warzones they are pretty much un-playable, and I see removing the file swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor will increase FPS in warzones, but I don't want to lose out on all the effects and sounds. If I can I would love just to run that file on the RAM.

Thank you very much!

[Ocmer_]

Is there anyway to "RAMDRIVE" only the file swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor to increase performance? If so, how do you do it? I'm sorry I'm a major noob when it comes to this.

Any help will be greatly appreciated. I love playing this game but I just can't play warzones they are pretty much un-playable, and I see removing the file swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor will increase FPS in warzones, but I don't want to lose out on all the effects and sounds. If I can I would love just to run that file on the RAM.

Thank you very much!

First off you have to rename the asset file 'swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor' to 'swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor'.

 

Then you run this code to setup the ramdisk (imdisk has to be installed).

To run the code use winlogo+r, type in cmd and hit enter, type the code.

imdisk -a -s 175M -m T: -p "/V:SWTOR_RAM /fs:ntfs /q /y"

 

Now it is time to create the link from the assetfolder to the ramdisk.

Same as above, but make sure you give the right path for <installpath>.

mklink "[color="Yellow"]<instalpath>[/color]\Assets\swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor" "T:\swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor"

 

Last you should run this script aswell everytime after reboot, to re-create the ramdrive and copy the asset file to the ramdisk. Copy this code into notepad, and save as anyname.bat

if exist T: imdisk -D -m T:
imdisk -a -s 175M -m T: -p "/v:SWTOR_RAM /fs:ntfs /q /y"
copy "[color="Yellow"]<installpath>[/color]\Assets\swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor" T:
ren "T:\swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor" swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor

 

note; the ramdisk is then 175MB while the fx asset file is 169MB so it should be big enough.

Edited March 9, 2012 by Ocmer_

[Anubis_Black]

I have been using the 1.6GB RAMDrive with only Cache + FX and unfortunately I haven't seen any improvement in fps so far. Should I give the 4GB version a go? Has anyone actually seen an increase in fps by including the dynamic asset files over the basic FX + Cache setup?

[Imasithbanana]

Depending on how much ram you have you really have nothing to lose. Worst case is you unmount and change back to whatever you had before. From what I've seen by watching proc mon is as you move or are in area's the game loads things into the diskcache from the .tor files and it can do a lot of reads depending on what's going on. IF it was me I would try the 4GB method and then set everything to low + whatever other fixes you might have and try it.

 

Since this game has bad code I would start with the very minimum and then build on that to see what your base FPS is and try to build on that.

 

This may have no impact but meh.

 

 

I have been using the 1.6GB RAMDrive with only Cache + FX and unfortunately I haven't seen any improvement in fps so far. Should I give the 4GB version a go? Has anyone actually seen an increase in fps by including the dynamic asset files over the basic FX + Cache setup?

[King_Stinkeye]

Man, you would have gone insane during DOS days if you had a Sound Blaster ISA Card.

 

You just took me back to a place of awesome by just mentioning a Sound Blaster and ISA. Those gigantic golly gee gosh darned holy mackerel cards were the best.

 

I remember trying to setup coax networks with ISA Nic's. Back when IRQ's were something that people had to know about. Jumpers, and IPX and Terminators. You'd spend most of the night trying to get dummies system to work and then whatever was left playing Doom 2 or Duke. Good times.

Edited March 10, 2012 by King_Stinkeye

[Imasithbanana]

So for fun and testing I sat and watched what tor files loaded when I went into a WZ mainly Huttball as that was the only thing that queued.

 

besides the FX ones I did the following

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bfab_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_area_misc_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_global_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bmaf_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_area_nar_shaddaa_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_gfx_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_art_area_all_item_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_area_hutta_1.tor

\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_art_weapon_1.tor

 

It was interesting to say the least as a few normal things in the WZ failed to load and made it really hard to play. Also I did not see a big jump in my FPS I was about 20FPS or so which was about normal for me anyways. So I'm going to unload those until I find whatever broke the WZ in the 1st place.

 

I think I might try working with the \Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic\Assets\swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bmaf_1.tor files they seem to the toon animations and when a lot of people are doing a lot of things that file took a lot of hits.

 

 

[Anubis_Black]

Depending on how much ram you have you really have nothing to lose. Worst case is you unmount and change back to whatever you had before. From what I've seen by watching proc mon is as you move or are in area's the game loads things into the diskcache from the .tor files and it can do a lot of reads depending on what's going on. IF it was me I would try the 4GB method and then set everything to low + whatever other fixes you might have and try it.

 

Since this game has bad code I would start with the very minimum and then build on that to see what your base FPS is and try to build on that.

 

This may have no impact but meh.

 

I have 8GB RAM so I guess I'll give it a go. The thing is, I only log in to farm 16 man Nightmare, so I can test it like one or two days a week tops. I really have no idea what else to do, I am running TuneUp Utilities in Turbo Mode, ThrottleStop, the RAMDrive setup suggested here and with everything on Very Low I still get 10 fps during boss fights (min 7, max 12). And my machine is powerful enough to run most games on Ultra, this game is a joke.

[AprilOne]

Guys if you just open any quite detailed File monitor program and play with SWTOR for sometime in areas with FPS drops like Fleet, Ilum, Warzones you will see that main_art_fx_1.tor isnt so heavy used file and DiscCacheArena usage is quite small.

 

Wanna proof? Here it is. For example i'm using ProcessMonitor utility from Microsoft website and there are alot of data gathered about file system activity and about each used file. I think there 2 most important parameters affecting FPS drops - seconds spent working with each file and how much megabytes read working with each file.

 

Just quick sorting by these parameters will show you real picture and this will show what i said in first paragraph.

 

You can check this for yourself fast and simple.

 

Almost always most usable files will be assets files containing armor models. Here list of them:

swtor_main_art_dynamic_chest_1.tor - chest slot armor pieces

swtor_main_art_dynamic_chest_tight_1.tor - i think heavy chest slot armor pieces

swtor_main_art_dynamic_head_1.tor - head slot

swtor_main_art_dynamic_lower_1.tor - pants slot

swtor_main_art_dynamic_cape_1.tor - seems like another chest armor pieces looking as capes

swtor_main_art_dynamic_hand_1.tor - hands slot

swtor_main_art_dynamic_mags_1.tor - dont know exactly

 

This files will make lion share of disk reads comparing to other Assets folder files and there will be gigabytes of data read just from this files after 20 mins of play.

 

If you got enough RAM move all this files there, but this suggestions already told in this thread. More assets files in RAM = less FPS drops.

 

Here is list of other files i noted that used quite often:

swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor - this is top 1 file at Ilum for me, even more read that armor models.

swtor_main_area_alderaan_1.tor - nice to have this file in RAM during Alderaan Civil War WZ

swtor_main_area_hoth_1.tor - another file for Ilum. Yes, i'm not mistaken - Ilum is using same assets as Hoth but after this they are colored a bit different.

swtor_main_area_nar_shaddaa_1.tor - this file is quite used during Huttball warzone.

 

swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bfab_1.tor

swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bfns_1.tor

swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bmaf_1.tor

swtor_main_anim_humanoid_bmns_1.tor - i think these 4 files contain animations of female and male models and used quite hard, but not so hard like armor models assets.

 

swtor_main_area_misc_1.tor- another file for huttball wz. I think it contain different huttball obstacles like fire and acid pools.

swtor_main_art_weapon_1.tor - this file seems to contain weapon models.

 

Moving this files to RAM doesnt improve your max FPS this will just decrease numbers of FPS drops and will make SWTOR to run smoother, and my experiments with different desctops of mine and my friends with configurations starting from Core 2 Duo 2.5 GHz 4GB RAM 9600GTS 512MB VRAM to i5 3GHz 8GB RAM GTX 560Ti confirm this.

Edited March 10, 2012 by AprilOne

[LeoThaTiGRR]

everything ran smoothly, except the DiskCacheArena jucntion. When i tried to make it as specified, i recieved the "windows can not locate the path or directory" error. Help?

 

would it be "T:\swtor\DiskCacheArena" instead?

 

EDIT: /facepalm... i left out the space between "Program Files(x86)"

 

Thanks for the help. I rely on players more than bioware...

Edited March 10, 2012 by LeoThaTiGRR

[FallenKerish]

First off you have to rename the asset file 'swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor' to 'swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor'.

 

Then you run this code to setup the ramdisk (imdisk has to be installed).

To run the code use winlogo+r, type in cmd and hit enter, type the code.

imdisk -a -s 175M -m T: -p "/V:SWTOR_RAM /fs:ntfs /q /y"

 

Now it is time to create the link from the assetfolder to the ramdisk.

Same as above, but make sure you give the right path for <installpath>.

mklink "[color="Yellow"]<instalpath>[/color]\Assets\swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor" "T:\swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor"

 

Last you should run this script aswell everytime after reboot, to re-create the ramdrive and copy the asset file to the ramdisk. Copy this code into notepad, and save as anyname.bat

if exist T: imdisk -D -m T:
imdisk -a -s 175M -m T: -p "/v:SWTOR_RAM /fs:ntfs /q /y"
copy "[color="Yellow"]<installpath>[/color]\Assets\swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor" T:
ren "T:\swtor_main_art_fx_1_ORIG.tor" swtor_main_art_fx_1.tor

 

note; the ramdisk is then 175MB while the fx asset file is 169MB so it should be big enough.

 

You are awesome, thank you so much!!!! I'm getting ready to try this now.

Crap never mind, I have XP and the mklink doesn't work for XP.

Edited March 10, 2012 by FallenKerish