RAMDISK for SWTOR (increased performance)

[exca]

I've been using this for a while, and now v3.0 has completely changed the GUI. I've noticed I can't drag the window while having a subwindow open on it. (Like, if I click about, I can't drag from the actual main window, I have to drag from the about window that drops down) Minor bug, but it is a little irritating. I also was wondering if there is a way you can put the artwork as a seperate file, so I could possibly reskin it. (Not terribly fond of all the red lightsabers, I'm sure the artist put a lot of time into it and it's great, just not my preference.) Or a flag that will turn off the artwork and just have the simple windows scheme it used before, without having to go back to v2.9.5? Or perhaps, I could challenge the artists to come up with different themes, Republic Theme, class themes, Sith Empire theme, etc..

 

Now that I've said that, I used this program for a little over a month, everything seemed a lot smoother with it. I load everything onto the ramdrive. (48 gigs here) Everything loads faster and no more hitching. Just today, I tried playing "retail" (just to see if I could notice any difference the other way around, as I'd used it exclusively for over a month) and I DEFINITELY NOTICE A HUGE DIFFERENCE. The game hitches all the time, combat animations don't play fully, some of the combat animations for my party members don't play at all. So, this is definitely improving the game performance a lot. To me, the difference is like watching a high definition movie on a nice 1920x1080 television, then watching the same thing on an old 4:3 television. I've experienced the high definition, I can't go back to the 4:3.

 

-Jen

I know about the drag and drop thing. Maybe we'll fix it somehow but for now it was the easiest bug free way to do it gluing the 2 windows while disabling the top one (to prevent launch while settings are open for example). We'll look at it, but it's far down on the priority list.

About the artworks : don't forget this is a free tool we provide, we earn nothing doing it, we do it on our free time instead of playing. The first thing is to have had t working flawlessly. It's not complete as I read since there seems to be a little issue with drive letter for a few people. I think you can forget about skins to be honest. Maybe we'll include 2 or 3 backgrounds for the main window that you can change in the settings but it'll be it. You can try still to send in game credits to the artists to encourage them maybe lol.

Just to give you an idea I don't know exactly about the 3 others who worked on it, but as far as I'm concerned I think I spent more than 200 hours on this little project. And I'm a bit satisfied with the result (ease of use, stability, etc...) so actually I'm a little slow on it. I'm playing a bit more. I'll try to fix the 2 or 3 issues with drive letters or a few other things I have in mind but that's it for now. I know the artist will clean up the effects a little after too. I'll give them the 2nd theme idea to see what they think, but I wouldn't bet much on it.

[Ocmer_]

Hah indeed quite some time spent on this. To create 1.0 on my own had to do quite some research as I've never made a Windows app and took a while. Also the creation of the batchscrips in the early days and giving quite some support and resolving problems here in these related threads.

 

-just a bump-

[exca]

I'll try to give a look at the drive letter issue this week end.

I'll keep you updated.

Edited May 16, 2012 by exca

[Pumpike]

do you know how to get information which files need to load for this planet or that planet?

 

do you have a program?

[Ocmer_]

do you know how to get information which files need to load for this planet or that planet?

 

do you have a program?

 

I just used Windows Resource Monitor that can be accessed trough taskmanager > performance.

Tho I have heard that there are other programs that can do this and even create a logfile of it for readback.

 

Guess you should just google a bit on these types of programs.

[Syanis]

Is there a simple setup manual for idiots like Ramdisks for Dummies? Interested in trying this but not sure if I'm setting it up correctly. Downloaded Imdisk and installed, downloaded swtor unleased 4.0 and installed, made the 2 batch scripts as instructions but doesn't seem right.

 

My second question is there a way to use this while also using a Tunneler program? I use Pingzapper as where I live I basically can't play without tunneling but I start the game through the tunneler and swtor unleased starts the game through its tool.

 

Thanks

[Minyon]

I have 16 gigs of RAM, AMD Phenom II X4 975 and Radeon HD 6870. That method give me 30 fps and now i can record video at 1920*1080 almost without FPS and performance drop at max quality.

 

Thanks a lot.

Edited May 14, 2012 by Minyon

[Ka-tel]

Hi, can someone knowledgeable comment on whether this setup will fix the issue with ground effects not appearing during some encounters? (i.e. the ground fire effect of Karagga, and the lightning spires and other effects during Firebrand + Stormcaller in Denova)

[exca]

Fixes isn't coming out as fast as expected since .... D3 came out XD

[alifaraaz]

Hi, can someone knowledgeable comment on whether this setup will fix the issue with ground effects not appearing during some encounters? (i.e. the ground fire effect of Karagga, and the lightning spires and other effects during Firebrand + Stormcaller in Denova)

 

Hey, at the moment I plan to test this in the near future. Someone else on the forums who had problems all the time with Karaggas fire said it worked fine for him. However it could have just been a 1 time fluke. So further testing is needed.

 

So far he tested by just adding: swtormain_gfx, swtormain_art_fx_1, swtormain_area_raid_1 and swtoren-us_area_raid_1

onto the Unleashed drive.

 

I'm doing the same so I'll try and report back in a week or two. Gonna try and get guild members who also have problems to try and test it too.

[alifaraaz]

Apologies for the double post.

 

Went into EC today and did the Tanks fight. Using Unleashed with the files mentioned loaded, I still failed to see the firstDouble Destruction, however I could see everything else.

 

Definitely more testing needs doing but it clearly hasn't solved the problem. However its possible maybe another couple of files need adding.

 

It's also possible that despite being on the RAM drive it might be speeding up the time taking to load the effects, just not enough.

[exca]

It might as well be a GFX driver issue

[Nishifumi]

Would it be possible with an x79 board to move all of swtor to a ramdisk?

 

If so, could someone explain how to move the program there when it sets up files in other areas?

 

Thanks,

 

-Nish

[ISTrick]

I would just like to add:

 

I use SWTOR Unleashed, and I used to get choppy FPS all over the show that ranged from 25fps-50fps (with everything mostly on med/high - except those naughty shadows), then started using the Ramdisk/Unleashed tool.. and now have everything on high, get a steady 50-60fps all the time (including Warzones/Indoors/EVERYWHERE) with far quicker loading times than previously experienced.

 

I only have 8gb Ram - so only have the main 5 things on the Ramdisk.. lord knows how good the performance jump would be if you put everything on the disk...

 

Thank you OP - you're a miracle worker (and the rest of the SWTOR Unleashed team). :D:D

[Memetical]

Wow! I cannot thank you guys enough (for everyone who took part in developing SWTOR Unleashed). I have been playing this game on an INTEGRATED GRAPHIC laptop (Acer 7551 AMD 3.0quad vision graphics). I had been able to make the game "Playable" but with significant lagging in pvp (which I've been able to 'play into' in order to do well) but have been looking at this option for a while to see if it helped my game. I just upgraded to 8g Ram and finally took the plunge to try the Ramdisk (which was something I never had done before despite my knowledge of computers). It was amazingly easy and after 3-4 restarts with different assets chosen (I have the basics with the character animations selected) I cannot get over the impact that it's had on my game. I've been able to go from doing maybe about 250k in Huttball to 350k (I'm a sentinel) and I get 25-35fps in intense fights. The only thing that messes me up is AOE (fire/smoke effects) but that's obviously gpu limitations. The loadtimes are better, and the game plays exactly how one would expect with the graphical limitations that I have instead of hangups and stutters.

 

I do have a quick question though. I use cleanmem which has always been effective at fixing any little leaks that occur but I'm afraid to use it thinking that the program will "clean" an unused file on the ramdisk that the game might use. On average (before the ramdisk) after loading a zone I would use cleanmem to clean the ram and get about 5-10% more usage back. Would using it now cause any problems with the Ramdisk?

 

And another question....are there any assets (other than the ones listed) that people have found to increase pvp or fleet performance? I'm using the basic assets +animations. I'm sitting at 70% Ram usage (giving myself 30% left which is enabling me to use firefox at the same time.)

 

Thanks again for the great work. Now if only the developers would put in the same effort in fixing the engine that guys like you have!

 

/respect

 

~Michael

[exca]

Thanks for the positive feedback!

[frtommy]

Hi,

 

Thank u very much for this Awesome tool.

It works very well.

I use the unleashed version

 

Just a question:

I'm a daily player. I'm lvl 50 and i usually do, Dailies on Belsavis Corellia and Ilium and ops with my guild, EC Norma and Hm. What files i must to select for a faster download of the Planet ?

 

I have a hd ssd corsair force gt sata 3, with win 7 ultimate x64 and swtor.

And i have 8gb of ddr3 1333mhz.

 

Thank you again.

Hope u reply me.

Bye bye.

[Memetical]

So yah...I wrote a very happy post 3 days ago after first using swtor unleashed. It worked very well for me and I was very happy. But yesterday morning when I started up the game in unleashed (I'm only using the minimum assets recommended); the game kept crashing on the initial loading to character screen. I wiped the ramdisk and restarted and then ran the game normally and got a blue screen of death....I haven't had a blue screen error on this computer since I've gotten it, and it had something to do with memory. In order to fix this issue I've had to run the swtor repair tool....this fixed the issue. The repair tool only found 2 files that needed repaired. I played the game the regular way (and missed unleashed) then later in the day I got brave and tried it again. I played all night with no issues then this morning (sunday) I started it up again with unleashed to only have another crash and the repair tool found 10 files it needed to repair. So at this time I don't feel safe playing it with unleashed.

 

Now I know that running a ramdisk is some advanced user stuff but I thought I had a grasp on it. I'm pretty much at a loss and I dont know what I can do....or what the problem could even be.

 

Anyone?

 

~Michael

[ISTrick]

Thanks for the positive feedback!

 

You guys are legends - have increased my PvP enjoyment by .. oh, I don't know... 100000%.. thanks!!!!!

[Reevax]

how about they optimize the game? The average PC user cant do all this.

[Nishifumi]

Would it be possible with something like a z79 board to put the whole game on a ramdisk?

 

-Nish

[Ocmer_]

Hi,

 

Thank u very much for this Awesome tool.

It works very well.

I use the unleashed version

 

Just a question:

I'm a daily player. I'm lvl 50 and i usually do, Dailies on Belsavis Corellia and Ilium and ops with my guild, EC Norma and Hm. What files i must to select for a faster download of the Planet ?

 

I have a hd ssd corsair force gt sata 3, with win 7 ultimate x64 and swtor.

And i have 8gb of ddr3 1333mhz.

 

Thank you again.

Hope u reply me.

Bye bye.

 

If you mean faster loading of a planent, there are asset files with the name of the planet in it, try those. Altough this solution is not really intended for this kind, you can ofc always try for yourself.

[Ocmer_]

So yah...I wrote a very happy post 3 days ago after first using swtor unleashed. It worked very well for me and I was very happy. But yesterday morning when I started up the game in unleashed (I'm only using the minimum assets recommended); the game kept crashing on the initial loading to character screen. I wiped the ramdisk and restarted and then ran the game normally and got a blue screen of death....I haven't had a blue screen error on this computer since I've gotten it, and it had something to do with memory. In order to fix this issue I've had to run the swtor repair tool....this fixed the issue. The repair tool only found 2 files that needed repaired. I played the game the regular way (and missed unleashed) then later in the day I got brave and tried it again. I played all night with no issues then this morning (sunday) I started it up again with unleashed to only have another crash and the repair tool found 10 files it needed to repair. So at this time I don't feel safe playing it with unleashed.

 

Now I know that running a ramdisk is some advanced user stuff but I thought I had a grasp on it. I'm pretty much at a loss and I dont know what I can do....or what the problem could even be.

 

Anyone?

 

~Michael

Hmm this is strange, when this happend were you sure the ramdisk was mounted succesfully and filled with files? Also when this occurred did you try to launch retail as it will fix all changes made by unleashed? In the OP there is a small list of common errors can you select one of those that happened to you?

 

Thanks.

[Ocmer_]

Would it be possible with something like a z79 board to put the whole game on a ramdisk?

 

-Nish

 

Well the current version of the program needs a free diskletter before it does something. On the other hand you can copy the whole swtor game to the ramdisk to that board but then you still have to manually link the local SWTOR folder to that board else those cache files will stay on a slower disk.

[frtommy]

If you mean faster loading of a planent, there are asset files with the name of the planet in it, try those. Altough this solution is not really intended for this kind, you can ofc always try for yourself.

 

Ok...thank u for the reply.

I already did. But only planet's asset doesn't work... I mean, example:

 

I'm on fleet....going to my Ship. and travel to Ilium.

At this point i click on EXIT ship inside the ship's door.

Now the loading of Ilium it's really slow.

After that, when i'm on ilium and i must load everything , it's really fast and your tool works very well.

 

So, u know what is or what are the file/s name for that loading problem?

 

Thank u.

Bye bye.