Darthater asks BW about engine optimization.

[Tiam]

I lul'd at his response. IMO Bioware needs to just come clean and take ownership. People respect you more if you own up to you're short comings.

 

You can clearly see once again their egos are way too big for that to ever happen. They have been ignoring us since beta on issues with the game. They honestly believe they cannot fail.

Edited March 15, 2012 by Tiam

[crimsonki]

BW get your *********** heads out your *** get rid of your egos and fix your flawed game. It's NOT optimized and you suck at coding/making a smooth running MMO. (BTW the graphics are pretty much **** I can run Cysis better then this game... Same goes for Aion with it's new high def engy with bloom maxed 100+ players on screen etc. Both those games run faster)

[drosalion]

I lul'd at his response. IMO Bioware needs to just come clean and take ownership. People respect you more if you own up to you're short comings.

 

Agreed. Not only does it earn them respect but it also gives people a sign that they are atleast attempting to fix the problem as opposed to even ignoring that one even exists

 

It will never happen though.

Edited March 15, 2012 by drosalion

[Jederix]

Sometimes I open my bags while moving and though that isn't the point...

 

Wrong.

 

That drop in FPS comes regardless of you are moving or not.

 

So?

 

/more chars

[Jederix]

It doesn't matter.

 

You said it was taken out of context.

 

It's one sentence.

 

And the rest of his answer just avoided the question.

 

Either way he is saying the issue is not their problem.

 

He said it could be taken out of context. Not that it was. You should read closer instead of just jumping to conclusions.

[Jederix]

You can clearly see once again their egos are way too big for that to ever happen. They have been ignoring us since beta on issues with the game. They honestly believe they cannot fail.

 

Doubtful. With the vitriol you and your ilk are spewing all over these forums because you feel slighted with the game, I'd ignore too if I were the developer.

[Goretzu]

Doubtful. With the vitriol you and your ilk are spewing all over these forums because you feel slighted with the game, I'd ignore too if I were the developer.

 

 

I reckon the know what's happening, it's what they can do about it that is in question.

 

 

I think that's the reason behind them mothballing RvR/Ilum in 1.2 for the foreseeable future.

[Tiaa]

He said it could be taken out of context. Not that it was. You should read closer instead of just jumping to conclusions.

 

Please post something constructive before I report you.

[Jaelun]

Please post something constructive before I report you.

 

The same goes for you. He's not required to take a stand against BW just because -you- do.

[kidatwood]

I can't believe that no one read past his remark to dh. Where he said they did. Make some. Changes to where it ran smoother on lower end machines!

[bahdasz]

When it stops being your computer's fault? 10 FPS on Alderaan is far lower than average. Hell, whenever I see a doomsayer going off about how bad the engine is, it's always "20 FPS on the fleet."

 

BS. I bought a new rig because my old one lagged to death on SWG, this PC could run 2 instances of SWG at the same time with all graphics optimized and not skip a beat. So I can tell you right now, when I'm getting 10 fps just walking around a lightly crowded area in a world in TOR, it's the game not the machine. Don't even get me started on the slow strobe movement syndrome on the friggin' fleet.

 

Good for you, you have nothing better to do than build some friggin supercomputer and play games all day. Some of us work our butts off to have what is normally considered a really good gaming computer so we can enjoy some of our rare free time, and a crappy game engine ruining that little bit of relaxation is not acceptable... especially from a brand new game.

Edited March 15, 2012 by bahdasz

[kidatwood]

BS. I bought a new rig because my old one lagged to death on SWG, this PC could run 2 instances of SWG at the same time with all graphics optimized and not skip a beat. So I can tell you right now, when I'm getting 10 fps just walking around a lightly crowded area in a world in TOR, it's the game not the machine. Don't even get me started on the slow strobe movement syndrome on the friggin' fleet.

 

Good for you, you have nothing better to do than build some friggin supercomputer and play games all day. Some of us work our butts off to have what is normally considered a really good gaming computer so we can enjoy some of our rare free time, and a crappy game engine ruining that little bit of relaxation is not acceptable... especially from a brand new game.

 

Ok what are the system specs of swg versus the specs. Of TOR kinda. Different I would say!

[Goretzu]

I can't believe that no one read past his remark to dh. Where he said they did. Make some. Changes to where it ran smoother on lower end machines!

 

 

 

I think it runs pretty well on low end machines to start with, had it running on something well below minimum spec and it was playable (all be it barely).

[lhpgators]

This shows how little you actually know...

 

Also

 

 

 

 

 

 

Except the part where the guys at GameInformer had the same issue on their monster machine. Can be found in the "Massively" section of their March 2012 issue. In addition to this Tom's Hardware had the same issues in Beta and had commentary about how much work their engine needs.

 

^^ This

[MGriffith]

His example is applicable to everyone. Every player in this game has this issue. Try it yourself. While running forward open the character window repeatedly. The game freezes up for a split second every time.

 

A split second... That really is a game breaking bug is it?

 

And why ever would I want to run and open my inventory window repeatedly?

I mean, really?

 

Occasionally I open it on the run for a quick checking of something but that is it. Just opening and closing it in quick succession seems to me like trying to find something to complain about. At some point the doctor is right to tell you to stop doing that.

[MGriffith]

BS. I bought a new rig because my old one lagged to death on SWG, this PC could run 2 instances of SWG at the same time with all graphics optimized and not skip a beat. So I can tell you right now, when I'm getting 10 fps just walking around a lightly crowded area in a world in TOR, it's the game not the machine. Don't even get me started on the slow strobe movement syndrome on the friggin' fleet.

 

Good for you, you have nothing better to do than build some friggin supercomputer and play games all day. Some of us work our butts off to have what is normally considered a really good gaming computer so we can enjoy some of our rare free time, and a crappy game engine ruining that little bit of relaxation is not acceptable... especially from a brand new game.

 

If you have 10fps on a lightly loaded PvE zone then I am afraid you do have a bottleneck on your computer that has nothing to do with the game and rendering engine. That bottleneck may having nothing to do with the usual hardware that gets cited though. E.g. is your power supply providing not only enough Watts but also enough Amps to run both a high end CPU and GPU? Have you tested your memory chips? Is the chipset that runs the databusses (for the SATA, the memory chips and the PCI-e) running hot, chocking up or throttling? Poor airflow in the case may cause the computer to scale down to avoid overheating making all that power in the CPU and GPU go to waste.

 

I am having a fairly mediocre computer and no problem running this game without apparent slowdown, hitching or other oddities that get reported. Granted, I do not visit Ilum which is problematic and being worked on by Bioware (i.e. recreated from the ground up)

 

The hero engine in general and this game in particular is memory intensive. It really puts the cache and/or hard disk to work shifting those megabytes in fractions of seconds. This in turn puts a load on the CPU for all the decoding and shifting to memory. It also means that the memory chips and the data bus get a work out. Because of the detailed geometry the collision detection is more work AND the graphics card as well as the preprocessing for it (e.g. more complicated UVmapping that has to unwrap the textures maps) just makes the computer work harder.

And if any step in this chain does not perform well enough the whole game slows down.

 

Why do you see the most slowdowns on Ilum, Warzones and busy fleet instances? Because player characters are the most memory intensive models (relatively speaking) and no game engine can preload or optimise for them. (unless of course all characters you encounter are wearing the same uniform and are essentially clones, then you can put hundreds of them on screen without a slowdown). The more player characters you see on screen the more the render engine (which is not the same as the game engine actually) will have to shift data to the graphics card. Thirty or sixty times a second.

 

Typically the approaches to solve this are:

Smaller zones. This reduces the geometry and texture load used for the zone.

Simpler geometries. Of course this makes the characters and environment look crude and blocky (works wonders for older games on modern graphics cards)

Smaller instances. Less players in the instance reduces the load on the graphics card.

Low resolution textures. Halving the dimension of the textures reduces the memory usage by a factor 4 (and makes decoding the map quicker too this freeing up the CPU some).

Less variation. If you only have one tree and one character model in a zone then you can repeat it thousands of times with modern grahics card without performance issue.

 

All of the approaches make the game look worse of course, and some are not available to a MMO due to the nature of the game. It is why single player games typically outperform multiplayer ones by a large margin.

 

With all this said, yes, SW:TOR certainly has issues and needs an optimisation pass or two. The fact that they had to pull Ilum and open world PvP clearly shows that. And as explained earlier in this discussion thread, the high resolution textures in the dialog cutscenes certainly look fantastic but they have unfortunate implications on the performance outside the scenes.

But all that is not the same as declaring the game, or its engine, a fail and blame it for all that is wrong with the world.

[Holden_Dissent]

Sometimes I open my bags while moving and though that isn't the point...

 

Wrong.

 

That drop in FPS comes regardless of you are moving or not.

 

It's still not the point.

 

It's like when everyone jumped on the ability delay bandwagon just because their speeders didn't fire up if you press forward right as the speeder progress bar finished. Yes, that was happening, but it wasn't the REAL problem or the REAL so-called gamebreaking issue that people claimed was really going on. Which I'm not really convinced it ever was because I never had an issue with ability delay. But my speeder did cancel if I hit forward when it completed.

 

To be clear. I think you're bringing up oranges when we're all talking about apples.

Edited March 15, 2012 by Holden_Dissent

[Kourage]

BS. I bought a new rig because my old one lagged to death on SWG, this PC could run 2 instances of SWG at the same time with all graphics optimized and not skip a beat. So I can tell you right now, when I'm getting 10 fps just walking around a lightly crowded area in a world in TOR, it's the game not the machine. Don't even get me started on the slow strobe movement syndrome on the friggin' fleet.

 

Good for you, you have nothing better to do than build some friggin supercomputer and play games all day. Some of us work our butts off to have what is normally considered a really good gaming computer so we can enjoy some of our rare free time, and a crappy game engine ruining that little bit of relaxation is not acceptable... especially from a brand new game.

 

 

 

10 fps in a lightly crowded area? Wow, you should do some investigation, because that is not typical.

 

 

I do not have a super computer. I have a 2.2GHz Core Cuo, 4 gigs DDR 2 RAM, and a Radeon HD 5770. I run 40-60 fps on fleet. I might drop to 20 occasionally on fleet. I run with everything maxed, except shadows on lightest setting. I only run at 1680x1050, which is right for my 21" monitor.

[Gohlar]

I have a computer where it is difficult to even find an upgrade at this point and I run the game on an SDD. Every game runs smooth as silk except this and Rift (which is still better than this).

 

I STILL get 40fps most of the time and we all know what happens if too many people get on screen at once (in an mmo lol).

 

The engine is bad. It's so bad they won't be able to fix it.

 

If you think this engine is good you either have weak eyes and can't see higher fps (some people can't tell), you are used to games running badly or you are in denial.

 

They can't fix it. They will have to keep designing around it. This is why SWTOR is more like a single player game. It literally can't be a true mmo.

Edited March 15, 2012 by Gohlar

[PostalTwinkie]

10 fps in a lightly crowded area? Wow, you should do some investigation, because that is not typical.

 

 

I do not have a super computer. I have a 2.2GHz Core Cuo, 4 gigs DDR 2 RAM, and a Radeon HD 5770. I run 40-60 fps on fleet. I might drop to 20 occasionally on fleet. I run with everything maxed, except shadows on lightest setting. I only run at 1680x1050, which is right for my 21" monitor.

 

So not to derail your statement too much, but....

 

You run at a lower resolution than many, and have one of the most demanding features turned down to the lowest setting. Which truthfully on your system you should be seeing the performance you are seeing.

 

The problem is that those of us with much higher end systems are seeing the same results! When we should be seeing far higher results from this game.

Edited March 15, 2012 by PostalTwinkie

[Sekhmit]

For alot of people it was fine during beta...myself included. This was when AA was a broken buggy mess (but still in the game), high res textures were also in, and the game ran smoothly. Then launch comes, my FPS halves, Shadows turn my FPS to CRAP indoors (a big huge warning sign of poor optimization.) and Warzones are buggy laggy choppy messes.

 

I will bring about my personal experiences with Alderaan Civil War in particular. Since launch i always had crap FPS, but it would always start smooth as butter. It wasnt until i got into combat that FPS gradually dropped to around 10, sometimes 5 over the course of the battle. Characters would flicker in and out of view, terrain would flicker and sometimes dissappear.

 

I monitored my hardware during this instance, noting that my GPU was sitting somewhere around 30% used, and my CPU never went over 50%. My ram went to about 80% used tops.

 

It pretty much reeks of "memory leak syndrome". As soon as i leave to go to fleet, my FPS is 50, my CPU usage goes above half, and my GPU remains cool and around 50 as well. Game runs fine otherwise, Voidstar and Huttball are stuttery but stable compared to Civil War. Theres also quite a few areas in the game where FPS drops simply by looking at an object or wall (which isnt detailed enough to warrant an FPS drop). So what does it sound like? My machine?

 

Considering i can run other games that look a trillion times better and are more demanding (BF3) i think somewhere between beta and now, someone screwed something up.

 

Edit: the inclusion of "very low " shaders is nice for those low end computers. When is bioware going to fix the game for those of us with GOOD hardware and still have crap FPS?

Edited March 15, 2012 by Sekhmit

[Tiam]

So not to derail your statement too much, but....

 

You run at a lower resolution that many, and have one of the most demanding features turned down to the lowest setting. Which truthfully on your system you should be seeing the performance you are seeing.

 

The problem is that those of us with much higher end systems are seeing the same results! When we should be seeing far higher results from this game.

 

What makes it worse is we have high end rigs and still have to turn things like shadows off to keep the fps from dropping worse in pvp wz's, illum, and the fleet.

[kjfett]

msconfig

 

startup

 

uncheck all that fluffware like Google's toolbar, skype and the bloated McAfee malware called an AV that is installed.

 

Reboot

 

Profit!

 

That aside though, I run an E4300 duo core 1.8Ghz with 6GB of Ram and a GT440 running 1920x1080 on a 23" LED. This is running Win7 64Bit with nothing else loaded but MS security essentials. Technically, I am below min requirements for the game.

 

I get over 30FPS in full WZs in PVP and have no issues on worlds like Alderaan. Sure I have shadows off....but I do have bloom on and everything else set to high so the game actually looks great for me.

 

My machine is only for gaming though so it hasn't been exposed to the junkware that can find it's way onto a machine to bleed off much needed resources as well.

[Rogoo]

A little help, from some other thread:

 

Here, let me help all of the people with awesome machines who never, ever get FPS problems.

 

1. Download Fraps. http://www.fraps.com/download.php

2. Turn it on, turn on the feature which lets you see the FPS

3. Start recording

4. Open inventory while running

5. Mount/dismount speeder

6. Join a Warzone and PvP for 10 minutes+

 

I want to see all of that with the FPS counter on and see if it never dips below the constant 60 that people are claiming.

 

And if you're too lazy use Fraps, if you're going to take a video, turn on your freakin' FPS counter by pressing Ctrl + Shift + F (that's the default keybind, you can change it).

 

Until then, I simply don't believe you that you're getting a constant 60+ FPS whereever you are.

[mutharex]

So how comes my 3 years old PC runs at 30-40 FPS on Alderaan?

People shouldn't be allowed to buy PCs if they don't know how to use them...