Ridlow Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 I was running SWTOR happily on my desktop until last week, but since coming back to uni I've had to switch to my laptop, and have been suffering very poor frame rates, the most I've seen has been around 30 in open areas, but it seems to fluctuate a great deal, and drops to 5-10 fps have been very common. My laptop does just about meet the minimum specs, but at the moment although SWTOR is just about playable it's not much fun really. I'm playing on the minimum possible settings with shadows etc switched off, and I've also optimized my laptop by turning off everything unnecessary in accordance with a very good guide I found. These are my laptop specs: OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit System Manufacturer: Packard Bell System Model: EasyNote TM82 Processor: AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core Processor (2 CPUs), ~2.1GHz BIOS: InsydeH20 Version V1.06 Memory: 3072MB RAM Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 (Approx Total Memory 1401 MB) I appreciate that laptops are problematic to upgrade, but I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to make SWTOR run better; I don't have the funds to get a new one and I can't bring my desktop. One thing I can easily do is upgrade to 8GB RAM, but I'm wondering whether this will make enough of a difference to make it worthwhile. I suspect that my GPU/CPU are the problem, but I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about this; the GPU is integrated, and I haven't been able to find any way to use an external graphics card somehow. Can anyone suggest anything I could do to improve my frame rate? I know it's not a very good laptop but I'm just hoping that I can make enough tweaks to just get my frame rate bearable. I'm quite happy to play on minimum settings as long as it runs smoothly for regular gameplay, even if it drops inside and warzones aren't playable. I'd really appreciate any help as at the moment it's too laggy to really enjoy. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mattdell Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 packard bell? didn't they go out of business in the mid 90s? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Culveren Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 (edited) I was running SWTOR happily on my desktop until last week, but since coming back to uni I've had to switch to my laptop, and have been suffering very poor frame rates, the most I've seen has been around 30 in open areas, but it seems to fluctuate a great deal, and drops to 5-10 fps have been very common. My laptop does just about meet the minimum specs, but at the moment although SWTOR is just about playable it's not much fun really. I'm playing on the minimum possible settings with shadows etc switched off, and I've also optimized my laptop by turning off everything unnecessary in accordance with a very good guide I found. These are my laptop specs: OS Name: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit System Manufacturer: Packard Bell System Model: EasyNote TM82 Processor: AMD Athlon II P320 Dual-Core Processor (2 CPUs), ~2.1GHz BIOS: InsydeH20 Version V1.06 Memory: 3072MB RAM Graphics: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4250 (Approx Total Memory 1401 MB) I appreciate that laptops are problematic to upgrade, but I'm wondering if there's anything I can do to make SWTOR run better; I don't have the funds to get a new one and I can't bring my desktop. One thing I can easily do is upgrade to 8GB RAM, but I'm wondering whether this will make enough of a difference to make it worthwhile. I suspect that my GPU/CPU are the problem, but I'm not sure there's a lot I can do about this; the GPU is integrated, and I haven't been able to find any way to use an external graphics card somehow. Can anyone suggest anything I could do to improve my frame rate? I know it's not a very good laptop but I'm just hoping that I can make enough tweaks to just get my frame rate bearable. I'm quite happy to play on minimum settings as long as it runs smoothly for regular gameplay, even if it drops inside and warzones aren't playable. I'd really appreciate any help as at the moment it's too laggy to really enjoy. Thanks. Unfortunately you are out of luck, you are really just going to need a new/more powerful computer to run the game. With a laptop upgrades are really tough to do, because laptop motherboards are non standard/case specific. Besides ram and HDDs, you really need to know what you are doing if you are going to pull apart a laptop, more so than a desktop. You need a much faster GPU, which i do not believe will fit in your Laptop, and will not have sufficient cooling. Id recommend a new desktop, but i can also recommend a few laptops that will run the game on minimum settings and will not break the bank (under 1000). If you have monitor and other things like mouse/keyboard you could build a desktop that will run the game for around 650 after tax/shipping, and windows. Edited January 19, 2012 by Culveren Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nidza Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 You can make a PC (without monitor) for 700$ that can run this game on high. My friend recently bought Deluxe msi motherboard 8 gb ram 6870 graphics card (optimized for 3 screens) 3 ghz intel quad cpu and the rest. for a 1000$ you can get a monitor and an SSD drive (worth it). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dremic Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 that machine you're probably better off slowly putting together a new machine. You can keep that video card thats the last thing you should upgrade though 1st get an motherboard I prefer Asus one that supports SLI get an intel i5-2500k.. it's essentially unbeatable for gaming. 4gb of dd3 you don't need more then 4 for game if somebody tells you otherwise walk away and slap them before you do power supply and case is pretty important too. last should be your video card.. you dont need something crazy.. single cards aren't the best for performance any more because of how easy and common SLI is, not to mention the performance in comparison to a single card. i5 2500k - 219 motherboard - 150 Ram - 40 ( at the most ) PSU - 100 - 130 depending on the wattage, you really only need 700 even for SLI video card suggestion depends.. if you dont want SLI i'd wait till later in the year because new cards are coming out.. if you want to SLI i'd probably get 2 460's considering the bang for your buck. If you want a single cawrd now my suggestion is the 560ti 448 classified by EVGA Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Donger Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 packard bell? didn't they go out of business in the mid 90s? best post of the day! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheMittani Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 depending on what framerate you're getting at the moment it won't matter too much. I had some extra cash last week and decided to upgrade my machine to try and improve my performance. Now have an 8-core machine with 16g ram, crossfire 6970 and one of the fastest SSD's currently available. And I'm still on only 30 fps on the fleet and it slows down to a crawl in the new illum zerg fest. on top of that it doesnt even load faster than with a normal harddrive... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
_Dark-Zero_ Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 i recently upgraded too. intel i7 2600k @3.4ghz msi Z68A-GD65 Gen3 Mobo 8 gb Crucial Balistix Tracer Ram Dual Channel @1333mhz xmp profile off single GTX 580 @stock speeds i kept my old 7200rpm hdd and thought i'd just get the OCZ synapse cache to help speed things ups and save cash on buying 512gb ssd... plus its much easier to set up than iSRT and learns faster. lastly a gigabit network killer and software for changing the tcp protocol and ack frequency easily as well as setting bandwidth limits on other apps if i'm ever downloading something while playing swtor. i must say all was smooth most of the time but sometimes i still got drops in fps below 40fps and rarely below 30fps. but when i overclocked my cpu to 4.5ghz and activated xmp profile for my ram i got a steady 55-60fps all the time.. i didnt even have to overclock my GPU... i did just for a test n there was no visible improvements that i could see and still steady 60fps. tested with 1080p res and max settings Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Deathnasty Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 erm throw it in the bin and use a wind up lawn mower Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjmc Posted February 16, 2012 Share Posted February 16, 2012 (edited) Memory: 3072MB RAMYou might be pretty tight on RAM. Another 1-2G would almost certainly not hurt. I've also gotten some benefit by attaching a 4G USB memory stick and putting Readyboost on it (right click on it in explorer and it should be under properties I think). Edited February 16, 2012 by sjmc Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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