Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?

[Katrar]

I hand built my system. All cables run under the MB tray in my full tower rig. My PS is walled off to vent its own heat as well as all drives.2 High rpm server fans in the front, Huge exaust fan. My coolmaster tower has 2 120 mill fans, one pulling one pushing. My comp is a beast. and the temp it runs for SWTOR is just unacceptable for a game with mostly low res textures and blocky shadows. i have watched the temp with all settings off or set to low... with default driver settings and with the driver overriding SWTOR both high and to low. No setting changes the heat the game is causing. That is not normal. I want to know why.

 

Pretty much the same. I'm liquid cooled, vertical airflow case (Raven), excellent cable management, lots of fans, lots of room, even with 6x core and an HD 6970 I never have heat issues in other games. Never. Always well within tolerable and under averages. I've had two heat related system shutdowns playing TOR. It's just insane. I'm getting concerned about even playing at this point because I am worried about damage I may be causing in the long run.

[Finaly]

well customer support / devs should give some answeres here...

 

if this is true the "sharding" will never be excluded from the game... and therefor the mmo part fails and people (except for uber fanboys) will start to go back to their old games...

[Ossos]

From Massively.com

 

http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/01/10/bioware-responds-to-the-old-republic-performance-issues/

 

Many Star Wars: The Old Republic players have raised complaints on the official forums about the game's technical performance. A disconcertingly large number of users report poor framerates despite lowering the game's graphic settings or running the game on a high-end PC. BioWare, however, is not convinced that there's anything wrong with the game, and instead the company asserts that users' lame rigs must be to blame.

 

OK, not really. But game director James Ohlen told Eurogamer that "most players aren't really having performance concerns" and chalks the reported performance issues up to low-end hardware. He goes on to add that "[the team] knows that it's important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for [the team is] to grow [its] service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines." In light of this, the studio has a team of developers who are devoted to fixing performance-inhibiting bugs, so if all goes well, we poor low-end-rig-users will be able to play the game comfortably soon enough.

 

 

So they're saying that it's us, not them. However, if this were true...why is it that I'm likely to get better performance on a crappy rig than a high end one?

[Baracca]

Here's my situation:

 

MB MSI G41M-P26, Intel Core2Duo E7300, 4 GB DDR3@1333, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, 7200RPM HDD, 700W PSU

 

And I've had no problem at all regarding reduced fps in crowded zones. I play with 1920x1080, shadows off, rest on high. I usually run with 60fps, and the worst I've had was @25fps.

 

And the reason of this situation is, and I'm pretty sure that's the reason, I have a 50MB Broadband (I download with 6.25 Mb off internet and I upload with 5 Mb).

 

Now regarding this server based rendering i'm also sure it's 100% true. My reason to belive this?

- There is allways a slight freeze when opening my inventory

- One day, as never before, i've had 0.5-1 seconds freezes while opening the map. In 30 min it disappeared. So it was clearly some problem at the server end not my end.

- The textures in some areas load in succession, not all at once. If my hardware was of fault, I should experience fps drop while this happens. But no ... I'm at 60fps and the textures keep load one by one. So i't sclear as day that all these textures comes from the server and are not rendered on my machine.

 

I've seen this freeze as well. I also notice that flashpoints have the worst delays. All night of questing just fine and suddenly lag? Hmmm. What's differnent about FP? oh yea, 3 other people in the zone all trying to stay synced up.

[LexonLightsaber]

Lets stay on topic, the best post this forum has seen period. Its on point and growing faster than any post that has been created, that's not coincidence. It's not because of the title of the post, it's because there is at least some validity to many consumer's issues. I believe this post has enlightened some people that thought it was there machine that was the problem to question that now. Which means maybe now the real percentage of people that are experiencing issues with this game will come to light. Meaning it might be more than 5%, and because of these reply's and this information the developer can now see the severity of such claims.

[Your_dominus]

Pretty much the same. I'm liquid cooled, vertical airflow case (Raven), excellent cable management, lots of fans, lots of room, even with 6x core and an HD 6970 I never have heat issues in other games. Never. Always well within tolerable and under averages. I've had two heat related system shutdowns playing TOR. It's just insane. I'm getting concerned about even playing at this point because I am worried about damage I may be causing in the long run.

 

lolwut.

You can't damage your pc playing software. Unless it's stressing components causing them to overheat, and you are oblivious to it.

And fat chance of that. My custom built PC is practicaly asleep rendering TOR.

Straining, TOR is not.

 

PS: " Raven" doesn't mean anything. listing specs serves a purpose. The name of your prebuilt does not.

The tech savy peeps wouldnt be cought dead buying a prebuilt .

Edited January 11, 2012 by Your_dominus

[Mandrax]

What did I say that is wrong?

 

I have a degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas. I've studied computer graphics, software rendering and artificial intelligence. I've worked on video games, including an MMORPG (which sadly was not completed). I currently work as a software programmer.

 

I would be happy to answer any technical problems anybody has, but I feel like people have already turned this into a flamewar and are possibly just trolling. I have very little patience for trolls. I didn't swear and I didn't target anybody in particular, just asking that everybody please stop with this nonsense. Its fearmongering!

 

Sorry, I'll try to be more patient. But people need to stop jumping the gun and assuming the worst.

 

To be perfectly honest, the discussion was pretty civilised until you came in (apart from the odd troll or white knight).

 

You clearly have some insight on this and people might take you more seriously if you communicated in a proper way.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Mandrax

[Sunsoar]

Good post and find op. Its people like you that help the gaming community know whats up.

[Baracca]

Assets not loading quickly could also be because of a fragmented or slow harddrive.

 

True however but with SATA 3 and SSD and 12 gigs of ram? I should be getting better performance.

[Tiron_Raptor]

Since you seem knowledgeable about such things, I'd like to be educated... Would you be kind enough (assuming you have the time and patience) to lay out a synopsis of the OP in layman's terms, and sort of shoot down the argument from there? I think it would help the thread quite a bit.

 

Also... Could this supposed "copy protection" not actually stream hi-res textures, but run some script or other that blocks them from working for the client?

 

Don't flame me too hard as I'm not computer savvy I'm looking to be educated on this, and too much technical stuff will go over my head!

 

I've slightly modified the OP:

 

Disabled High Res Textures? Sending the higher quality images would result in a tremendous increase in the memory load and bandwidth usage of the server, if it's rendered by the server. They could also just be too much for the remote renderer server to handle, and had to be disabled to prevent performance degradation.

 

The bolded part is far more likely to be what is happening with the high-res textures, if this is true and had an effect on it all.

 

Edit: actually, I'm gonna mess with that bit of the OP some more...

Edited January 11, 2012 by Tiron_Raptor

[Jonlinar]

At some point in the process it also has to start loading characters and their various assets, as well as their locations (which are continuously updated once initialized).

 

It's a perfectly plausible explanation for the bandwidth spike, I have to admit.

 

All the game client should care about, and it would be insane to code it differently, is asset id numbers in various configurations. BW should be sending a list of actor ids and other data like equipment asset ids and then your local client grabs the associated models and any relevant textures. If all that data was being streamed across the wire every time, scenes would take upwards around 20 minutes to load. I played EQ 2 using their streaming client and it did this the first time I went to a new area I haven't been in before. It would take several minutes to stream all the assets. Think about why the data files are so huge when you patch. Your local PC has the assets of the entire MMO on your HDD right now. The communication from BW simply tells the client how to mishmash it all together to accurately represent world data.

 

Also keep in mind that when you see data transmission numbers it's in bits, not bytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. So 50 kbps is actually 6.25 KB/s. To keep in TOR terms, the launcher config file is larger than that as it is 11 KB.

[Zannis]

Edit: This is basically all speculation! Do not panic yet! More data needed before running about screaming and shouting!

 

.

.

.

 

It makes so much sense, and potentially ties together a large number of the problems people have been reporting.

 

And for what? Copy protecting the models? Seriously?

 

You've created a post with a very conspiratorial tone, and already made your judgement based on questionable evidence at best. You then try to add an 'edit' line to backtrack and seem impartial. You can't have it both ways, OP. You can't 'unflame' a thread, much like you can't unhear a sound, or unsee a sight.

 

Sorry, but this thread is a waste of forum space. The Ability Delay crew must be looking for something new promote.

[Chaffery]

Thank you Tiron_Raptor for post, it explained for me all delays (loading, switching char, Ctrl+Esc).

As for example WoW and many other games have no delays because all files getting loaded directly from hard drive.

This game is worst, I have seen in my life. Even CD Project removed copy protection from off line game (The Witcher 2), because it was causing serious lag. It is a gamble but also sign of good will buy improving game playing experience for customers.

 

Having copy protection for on line game. LOL... What BW guys been smoking, or who ever is behind it.

Can't wait Tuesday, another game goes F2P. Let's see how many players will be left after 20'th. Probably spoken 5%, who don't have problems.

 

Edit: Unless BW will release patch next maintenance and sort out most of garbage in the game.

Edited January 11, 2012 by Chaffery

[Rialth]

If it's true or not is no longer relevant.

 

This thread has legs now.

 

We need an answer and quicker then we got it for the "action delay" thread please.

[louisfriend]

this is the worst sort of internet FAIL

 

people extrapolate facts from thin air. bolster hypothetical arguments with misc fancy sounding research. with no direct information, experience or eyes on knowledge make far reaching claims.

 

when in reality much simpler explanations are much more likely.

 

ie. brand new mmo released live to a myriad of users, in various locations, with unknown hardware and software updates to such.

 

that being said. it's entirely possible what's being put forward by the OP is 100% or mainly true.

 

but still... not knowing the reasoning behind it. it's impossible to judge. everyone instantly QQs and /subs (or posts as such in a internet forum) it's childish and silly.

 

one can imagine that content piracy is a huge issue. i mean have you seen those asian F2P browser games with models directly ripped off from blizzard games. add to that star wars. bioware and EA and i'm sure someone get all laywer-y during prep for launch.

 

 

 

all i know is (coming from an IT tech with nearly a decade of experience) is that no one ever knows as much as they think they do about computers. Users least of all. but Developers. are not immune to making a mistake either.

 

at the end of the day. cut 'em some slack and let the problem get identified and worked out. (assumming there is even an issue)

 

ALL CAPS QQ does nothing to forward the situation.

[jayderyu]

If this is true in any possible way. Then there is probably a misguided assumption to what is happening.

 

As some one pointed out the second process IS the server. It's not being transimited to another server out on the interent. It's purely local.

 

The purpose of the second process is very likely similar to WoW Warden.

For those that don't know. Warden is a app that runs in the background to try and identify cheating. These include

 

Model Changes(people would remove the Gate model in PvP to get an early lead)

Net Code(people would block damage code and resend good health codes)

Memory hacks(changing speed of moving and other cheats)

 

I was wondering if SWTOR would have some form of Warden and it sounds like they do. The OP posting this practically says this is what is happening, but the information is interpreted with a mistake. Though grats to the people who found it.

[Granrick]

We're not talking about animations being streamed, or textures. MAYBE the models. Even then probably only some of them.

 

We're not talking about an entire scene being pre-rendered or ALL the assets streamed: we're talking about a relatively small portion of it being streamed, or something, and holding up things waiting on it.

 

At most we're talking about a portion of the models being streamed: there's some evidence to suggest character models in particular may have been singled out.

 

In any case, most of the scene at least is clearly rendered locally, and final rendering is extremely obviously local for just the reasons you stated.

 

What we THINK might be happening is that, say, characters are being pre-rendered by the second process and zipped into the environment as rendered by the primary client.

 

Most of the effects I mention would be side effects of this process.

 

the more and more we reduce what might be "sent from the server for DRM", the closer and closer we get to it just running like a normal MMO. You know.. the data of what's going on and who's doing what being sent by the server to our clients to render. Obviously, that can cause lag if your client isn't receiving the info in a timely manner. This is something that will always exist with MMOs.

[miliways]

To everyone saying its the hardware that causes FPS problems is a fool. Most people posting about bad performance who post specs have pretty decent rigs. This doesnt include the people who are running low low end systems.......

 

There are people in here (myself included) that should be able to run 5+ instances of this game without any issues and have good fps.

 

run battlefield 3 maxed out at over 70 fps and swtor runs at 20 fps in the fleet and in open world goes from 100 fps to 30 and chugs along for 15 seconds then back up? hardware? don't think so

 

It's a joke. as for people saying "there are high res textures in the game right now, on your ship in cut scenes and intercom" if you knew anything about this game you would know that in the early beta there were high res textures in the entire game and not cut scenes. the game looked better... night and day difference. So now they only include them in the cuts cenes only? why? what purpose does that have?

 

There is ZERO reason to disable high res textures. if the end user cant run "high" settings then they lower it. Forcing high res off and then in the PTR erasing the high option and making med to high says a lot.......

 

open your eyes ppl..... there is something going on and OP has found SOMETHING that may explain some things. OP has found the smoking gun that will lead to the REAL reason why high res textures are off and why performance is terrible.

 

Now lets see if Bioware actually gives as a proper answer or if its BS

 

Sigh.. let me take the time to respond to you, and explain. Hopefully you'll take the time to read this, and it won't get buried under other pages.

 

 

Yes, your computer runs Crysis well, I'm sure it does. This does not mean your computer can handle 5+ versions of TOR running at the same time.

 

It ends up computers are kinda complicated!!

 

For instance, lets take Minecraft. Really, REALLY simple game, right? The textures are low-res, the models are just BLOCKS, literally just cubes. So your computer should be able to run about 1,000,000+ versions of Minecraft at the same time, since it can handle Crysis, right?

 

Well, yes and no. You're right that Crysis is 100x as detailed in models as Minecraft. The models are in the thousands of polys / tris and minecraft is in the tens of polys.

 

However, Crysis has its own efficient, ground-up C++ engine, which handles those assets as well as possible, uses the DirectX game library for low-level asset management and rendering, and other technologies. In short: lots and lots and lots of people have worked for a long time to make it as efficient as bloody possible.

 

Minecraft, on the other hand, runs on Java, which is a virtual machine which has to run on top of your computer. The code does not run natively (which is to say, as machine code, in the language of your processor. You see, different processors have different architectures, which require the program to be compiled again in that language. To avoid having to recompile, java runs as an interpreted language where a program called an interpreter, java, translates the minecraft java code into code your machine can run, but it does this as it goes, so it is much slower than native C++ code. Java's been worked on for years, so it is much faster now, much faster than it used to be, but the overhead is such that it is still much, much slower than C++. You could *never* run Crysis in Java. It would run too slow. )

 

You could have a machine that is liquid nitrogen cooled up to 5GHz or something stupid and you still couldn't run Crysis level games in a Java environment.

 

See what I'm getting at?

 

My computer can run Crysis 2 smooth, but sometimes Minecraft runs slow. Its the same computer. And minecraft is not, I assure you, sending textures or animations over the internet. lol.

 

There ARE high res textures in the game right now, if you put your settings on HIGH then during cutscenes you can see a difference in quality, bump mapping is present where it is not on the medium level textures. Go to your ship and click the intercom, it'll flash to high res and right back to medium, this should be obvious and dramatic if you look closely.

 

Why high resolution textures aren't available in the main game when the texture assets are there is anybody's guess. There has to be some bug the developers are working on. I agree with you, if it was just a performance issue, they should allow it, and some people could handle it and some people would have to turn down to medium.

 

This is indeed an area of concern and people are attempting to get information from the devs about it. The community leaders have said they are speaking with the development team to make sure they don't give us the wrong information.

 

Again, I can force AntiAliasing on my computer locally using the Nvidia Control Manager for my Graphics Card. If you can do that, it means the video you're seeing is being rendered from my graphics card, locally. It would not apply it to a random video stream, only things that are being sent through the DirectX pipeline.

 

There are lots of other reasons why we can verify this is NOT happening, as I've stated on other posts. I won't repeat them.

[Axxar]

This thread doesn't seem to make any sense. Edited January 11, 2012 by Axxar

[Parrothead]

What.

[gabrielhead]

I see a lot of speculation, and a lot of people debunking that. I would like those debunkers to explain what the second SWTOR.exe is doing with a sustained 100% of one of my cores.

[Bluebpy]

Sent it over to kotaku and other sites. Hopefully they run something on this as they and joystix have made posts about swtor performance

 

they more this gets out there the better.

[miliways]

True however but with SATA 3 and SSD and 12 gigs of ram? I should be getting better performance.

 

Whats your fragmentation like? Windows NTFS and FAT are notoriously terrible about managing fragmentation. Download SmartDefrag for free and run it on the drive with SWTOR on "deep optimize" and let it go all night (it'll take several hours). Fragmentation could absolutely cause slow loading performance, even on a very fast HDD.

[wearezombi]

This is BORDERLINE class action lawsuit if this is true...

 

I've had 2 6870's Crossfire.. running perfectly.. NEVER had a problem with my cards... and when i started playing SWTOR one of my cards went bad since i started playing..

 

Coincidence? i just recently had to replace my card.. ;(

 

 

I keep hearing other input from the community about the game running SO HOT... if this is true, if it hasn't damaged your systems yet? it's probably doing it RIGHT now over time.. i was just an unlucky one and my cards gave up on my first before others...

 

Yes a coincidence. Inconclusive and doubtful sir.

[Jonlinar]

I see a lot of speculation, and a lot of people debunking that. I would like those debunkers to explain what the second SWTOR.exe is doing with a sustained 100% of one of my cores.

 

It very well could be related to asset management. However, if it's not hitting the web then the streaming idea is jacked. Just because it's processing data doesn't mean it's streaming that data from the internet.