Optimization needs to happen asap

[Goretzu]

You never mentioned how much ram you had.. Also there is a huge performance difference between a GTX 560 ti and a GTX 660 ti..

 

Even still this doesn't account for anything you may have running in the background.. My only point was.. There seems to be a lot of people that want to sit back and blame the game engine instead of at least looking at their computer to see if there is anything they can improve..

 

I do get good performance in this game.. My wife also gets very good performance.. Her computer isn't as fast as mine, but it is no slouch by any means.. Core2Quad, GTX 560 ti, and 8 gigs ram.. Rinning Vista..

 

 

If you're talking about system RAM, anything over 4GBs is likely over kill and anything over 8GBs certainly is. SWTOR simply can't use that much.

 

The only way it will give you a significant increase is if you are using a RAM drive.

 

 

 

 

 

Although again the performance issues with the engine are in big battles (PvP or World Bosses etc.), not really doing general questing, hanging around the fleet and such.

[Goretzu]

I'm running a 5 to 6 year old machine on XP .

 

I've messed around a bit with XP vs Win 7 on SWTOR, and I've convinced myself (at least ) that you're better off running it on XP with the same system specs than Win 7, unless perhaps you are running a genuine beast of a machine. YMMV, of course.

[Blackardin]

I've messed around a bit with XP vs Win 7 on SWTOR, and I've convinced myself (at least ) that you're better off running it on XP with the same system specs than Win 7, unless perhaps you are running a genuine beast of a machine. YMMV, of course.

 

Interesting. Thanks. ;p

[Grimsmith]

750 watt here. Maybe why my old machine is out-performing many of the others. Good point. PS does matter.

 

Your PSU is often overlooked but is always critical. Mine's only 450 W but the system under full load should only pull 350 W so I have a little bit of leeway. I recently replaced the previous one as my performance went down and the system kept falling over, I replaced the PSU and it works fine again.

 

Either way, I cannot see this as just a game engine thing. To many varied results. If it were the engine we would all be having similar results.

 

It may be worth checking which mode the game is running in as well - fullscreen, fulscreen windowed or windowed - as it can make a hell of a difference! I get threadlocked on fullscreen windowed at 1,920 x 1,200 and see FPS drop to around 15 in heavily populated areas but can run fullscreen at 5,040 x 1,050 with FPS dropping to 40 at a minimum but generally 90+ on high settings without bloom (I don't like it, that's all). My system certainly isn't bleeding edge (Q6600, 4 GB RAM, HD 5850 and Win 7 Pro 64 bit) so the fact that results are so inconsistent also suggests to me that it's more likely to be local system rather than engine related.

 

There's not enough coherent data in this thread to draw a conclusion or even identify a pattern yet though. Game mode and settings, resolution, drivers, number of processes, OS - all have an impact on performance.

 

OP, you make a fair point but it simply isn't possible to optimise something until you know what exactly you're optimising for. This isn't a dig, I work with application support, QA and development for a sub 3,000 user base and have enough issues with determining what is and isn't something to be focussed on as each patch/release only has a limited number of man hours allocated with data up the wazoo! A nebulous "You need to do x" ranks far lower than "y is broken (add case history and data here), needs to be fixed ASAP!" Raise a ticket, give your DXdiag file and specify game settings to at least give them a chance to look into the matter. Odds are that if more people do so they'll be able to identify the areas with issues and resolve them. It could be ludicrously simple and require just a tweak, alternatively it may turn out to be hideously complex and require hundreds of hours of dev time to resolve - at this point in time nobody knows.

 

TL,DR: Data please. An informed conclusion and/or decision requires information

[Frumyrfrenzy]

As for my PSU, I bought a very good one to have no unpleasent surprises: Corsair AX850. Still, the i72600, 8GB Ram and gtx570 (enabling the second gtx 570 does not matter)@1080p with everything maxed out only deliver 25-30 fps in a fight in a 16 man operation. In some warzones the frames per second drop to around 40. It most definitely is not the PSU. Again, a CSR told me my CPU was to weak. Edited September 1, 2012 by Frumyrfrenzy

[MajikMyst]

Just to chime in here... I see a lot of people throwing around specs on processors, graphics cards, and RAM, but I don't often see anyone pointing out what kind of POWER SUPPLY you are using.

 

You can have all the shiniest hardware in the world, and if you have the same crappy 300W power supply that came with your original computer, you're going nowhere fast.

 

I dropped a Corsair 550W power supply in my Q6600 with a Radeon HD 6670 and 4GB of RAM, and I get great performance, even in those 30 v 30 world PVP battles in the Black Hole.

 

Your video cards will have a power requirement, and your supply should be able to provide well over that requirement.

 

Just hopefully a little helpful addition to all of the other performance tips here.

 

800 watt here.. Thermaltake I believe.. Been awhile since I actually looked at it.. But I know it is 800w or better..

[Rogoo]

You never mentioned how much ram you had.. Also there is a huge performance difference between a GTX 560 ti and a GTX 660 ti..

 

The framerate in crowded areas is CPU and network dependant.

[Mikeni]

The only thing they need to optimize is the handling of assets and shadows. Right now the game bogs down while trying to fetch assets for effects/gear when 30+ people are fighting in an area, even when the game is installed on a fast SATA3 SSD.

 

The ability to turn off self shadows, or have shadows only appear on characters but not terrain, or terrain but characters only have blob drop shadows would be helpful.

 

More options are never bad

 

They've made a lot of improvements so far. I used to get less than 20 fps in Alderaan Civil War, but now It is highly playable 30-60 fps on my rig.

 

Granted this is probably partially due to AMD making driver improvements and CrossfireX improvments, but things have gotten smoother.

 

I can play the game on Very High now, when I couldn't before. The only thing that borders on the unplayable is World PVP with a lot of players.

[Fyda]

I had a WvWvW-zerg with 50 people (not sure if 30 or 80 tbh, sorry.. ). A steady 40-60 fps. In a Ilum-zerg my FPS drops to 5-8 -_-

 

Later the day we fought a huge dragon with 40? people, all spamming lightning, fire, arrows, fireballs, pets etc. I still had a steady 40-60 fps. When people are standing AFK on the fleet my FPS already drops to 15?.

 

I didn't think it could be done but well, GW2 did it. I hope the money Bioware saved with the Hero Engine was worth it.

[Goretzu]

I had a WvWvW-zerg with 50 people (not sure if 30 or 80 tbh, sorry.. ). A steady 40-60 fps. In a Ilum-zerg my FPS drops to 5-8 -_-

 

Later the day we fought a huge dragon with 40? people, all spamming lightning, fire, arrows, fireballs, pets etc. I still had a steady 40-60 fps. When people are standing AFK on the fleet my FPS already drops to 15?.

 

I didn't think it could be done but well, GW2 did it. I hope the money Bioware saved with the Hero Engine was worth it.

 

Yeah a lot of other games can managed this (and better), its the standard SWTOR should be aiming at.

[Orakius]

That was my assumption, thank you for clarifying. There have been some very noticeable improvements lately and I appreciate it. I hope you're involved with the changes Matt - you're a very Adept developer and one I have complete confidence in.

 

That he is, though he is only one man, and must really be feeling the Strain of pleasing the community

[vandana_]

Hey all, I just wanted to pop in and say we are actively working on various optimizations (both server and client) and will continue to do so. It's extremely important for us to continually make improvements to our technology so we can have users across a variety of system specs and support large living worlds for those users to craft their virtual lives.

 

Nice to hear it.

 

Now, please introduce working Ilum or other large scale pvp and I will believe it. And we can call it MASSIVELY Multiplayer...

Edited September 4, 2012 by vandana_

[NuSeC]

I built my computer in Dec of last year and did it because of 2 reasons:

 

1) I had the extra 2,500... a Christmas bonus from work covered this and than some.

2) I wanted to get the full effect of TOR and wanted all the bells and whistles to work.

 

I logged in and am a very avid PVPer. When I got to 50 I headed right for Ilum. To my dismay, It was a slideshow.

Repub and Imps blasting away and complaining how they could not even see who they were shooting at. Lag was Horrabad! I could not believe my new Hi-End PC was having issues with this game.

 

my setup:

 

3xRaptors Raid 5

16g mem

AMD Bulldozer proc 4core

Asus MoBo

And a shiny new nVidia vid card GTX 560 TI

 

Now I have other new-er games on my PC and it as if I am not doing anything... it hardly ever needs to even push my fans. GW2, BF3 ect... there IS a lag issue with this game.

 

And for those saying why do you want/need 40 vs 40 or a like random number... It is because of OPEN WORLD PVP. but honestly if you run 16 man raids it is the same thing. or how about the opening to EV? the 2 guns and mobs that come out from that lag the WHOLE group. that is not a pc issue that is a sever/engine issue.

[StaticJoe]

The lag in this game is inexcusable--when I can run Skyrim at max settings with nary a hiccup, my rig is NOT the problem. I rebooted my pc twice yesterday and the lag was pretty much immediate fresh off a restart...fleet is a complete joke even with visible character limit set to LOW...I lost 2 fights yesterday due to the lag and there's no valid plausible reason for it especially considering the time this game is down for "maintenance"

[xorcist]

Hey all, I just wanted to pop in and say we are actively working on various optimizations (both server and client) and will continue to do so. It's extremely important for us to continually make improvements to our technology so we can have users across a variety of system specs and support large living worlds for those users to craft their virtual lives.

 

Does this mean there will be a team fulfilling the "living worlds" part as well? This may be old news, but as it is right now, the environment does not feel alive. It is difficult to pinpoint some of the factors behind this, where as other factors are obvious.

[Exsuna]

Logic applied or as people call it benchmarks

For the purpose we'll use the same system for each metric.

Game 1 company A: runs smooth

Game 2 company B: runs smooth

Game 3 company C: runs smooth

Game 4 company D: runs smooth

Game 5 company E: powerpoint presentation ie a slideshow

 

Now anyone can clearly see Game 5 has a issue so naturally you should blame the test system as it can't be Game 5's fault right?

 

In the end we can all throw out system builds until we're blue in the face about to pass out but that is what it comes down to. And older engine render systems no matter how mod'ed should run better on newer hardware not worse.

[Tiek]

26fps on an i7 and 670... yea the engine is not great but if that were my pc and i was getting that performance id be doing some investigating.

 

i hate to say stuff like that cause i know lots of people have issues but to be honest, ilum used to be a bit laggy for me but nothing unplayable, and i have had very little problem running this game. my computer is very average, and i do turn the graphics down. the planet load times are slow and sometimes when i first load into a packed fleet its a little choppy.

Edited September 6, 2012 by Tiek

[StarWarsWoox]

im running on a $60 graphics card at max setting at an avg of 40-60fps thats not out of the question on pricing... (gtx 260)

[TMar]

I always love how people on the far end of the bell curve chime in to say their FPS and the game are fine, so should everyone else's be. Everyone chiming in running sandy bridge or better procs with last or current gen video cards saying that 40-60 FPS is fine? That in itself is foolish but when you think to the other end of the bell curve how you do believe those people are running?

 

Even if you just meet minimum requirements you would expect to get 20-40 FPS but even with the change in graphics settings, if top of the line machines are hitting 40-60 constantly you would expect minimum specs to be hitting single digits easy. A bell curve is that because most people fall in the middle of those two so they could easily be hitting 10-30 FPS during normal gameplay which isn't right.

[chuixupu]

I can say that performance on my machine has mostly steadily increased over time, with the exception of immediately post 1.4 where I had some issues. I typically get 60-100 fps with a full fleet and in operations with mostly high settings. I tend to turn shadows down to low. I don't trust them! The issues I do experience I believe is more server lag - getting occasional 1-3 second lag spikes, most commonly in EC.

 

btw Geoforce 560 ti and i5 processor.

[Gammis]

System Specs:

CPU: I7 2600k OC 40%

RAM: 12gb (no point in more)

Primary HD: 240Gb SSD - tor is currently on this as well with GW2 and WoW

GPU: GTX 670 2gb

 

This was just tested becasue i was curious to what everyone was talking about with the FPS of the game, when I was alone on the Imperial Fleet with no one around me I was sitting at exactly 70 - 83 FPS this is on the Max Settings. Started to walk around and it instantly dropped 10 FPS still was running smooth, walked over to the pvp area where everyone seemed to be hanging out at the time and once I got near everyone it dropped again but by 30 FPS so a total of 40 FPS from moving and being near 20+ people, mind you the people were just standing around there was a brief moment where the FPS actually dropped to 20 FPS lasted for 8 seconds this was timmed had a friend start and stop a stop watch for it,. Went on WoW max settings with ToR running in the back round both in windowed mode which will hinder preformance and wow was sitting at 60 FPS with people casting spells randomly in SW where I was standing, there was about 45 ish people hard to count them considering them moving alot. But it was stable at 60 FPS no dropping when I moved or casted spells. Logged onto GW2 and did the same thing FPS was in the middle around 35 FPS also in windowed mode while moving with 5 people near me. Wow was still sitting at 60 FPS but Swtor dropped to 10 FPS with everyone standing around still.

 

What gets me is this game was supposed to be the be all end all MMO's was and is a MMo of 2011-2012 the newest and should be most fluid graphically pleasing game out there "should be" yet the game has very huge problems with keeping a stable FPS with multipule games open, while the others while also at max settings were sitting near to what I like 50 - 60 FPS. Honestly Bioware if you really want to make a comeback with this game read this post and take this in "change your graphics engine" find a better more stable system if this is even possible... even possible of course this is just when you release your X-pack have a brand new pre patch that introduces the new graphics engine and replaces the old one. Or better yet do what blizzard did "They created their own engine" I can almost bet most of the games players would agree with me on this too, and for those who disprove of everything above goahead you are just blind to all the facts i have given.

[symke]

It's the hero engine. They made a terrible choice to use it.

 

It's not hero engine. It's what EAware has done with it.

They bought license to use and CHANGE hero engine, even though devs of that engine told them they cannot guarantee engine working properly if they start messing with it. Well ... EAware's done it still and this is what we get.

 

I remember an interview with a dev of Hero engine saying that EAware wanted to adapt hero engine tools to work with large dev team, but by the looks of it they managed to botch it up seriously. Hero engine is supposed to work on other projects without such difficulties in running.

[Anosa]

optimization i a big issue. I would resub if they fixed it and fixed large scale pvp

[Grammarye]

Heh. TOR runs significantly more smoothly for me on a GTX 680 than GuildWars 2. The only reason GW2 gives better FPS at any point is that they've removed all the things you should be able to see. Haven't you noticed stuff popping in & out of existence, like, all the other players in a busy city? TOR doesn't do drop-out, only drop-in. Perhaps it should, but you're comparing apples & oranges until it does.

 

People wave their hands about optimisation like they've never had to track down a performance issue in code, or how it's something that you 'fix' in a mere few months, and then complain if people want specifics like 'ok, when exactly does it slow down, and when you're doing what?'.

 

It is not a coincidence that it has taken Blizzard almost ten years to get their engine to where it is today. From the basic engine they built for Warcraft 3, then extended to the first WoW, then upgraded several times, and oh yes, they're also sitting on a rather large pile of money so they can have people on optimising it full-time if they so desire.

 

This stuff isn't simple. Complain if you must, but constructive requests for 'when I do X, it's awfully slow, and here are some reproduction steps' is a heck of a lot more useful. For what it's worth, I empathise with those having difficulties - it would just be nice if people presented their case in a manner that is likely to yield anything done about it.

Edited December 28, 2012 by Grammarye

[kidatwood]

Heh. TOR runs significantly more smoothly for me on a GTX 680 than GuildWars 2. The only reason GW2 gives better FPS at any point is that they've removed all the things you should be able to see. Haven't you noticed stuff popping in & out of existence, like, all the other players in a busy city? TOR doesn't do drop-out, only drop-in. Perhaps it should, but you're comparing apples & oranges until it does.

 

People wave their hands about optimisation like they've never had to track down a performance issue in code, or how it's something that you 'fix' in a mere few months, and then complain if people want specifics like 'ok, when exactly does it slow down, and when you're doing what?'.

 

It is not a coincidence that it has taken Blizzard almost ten years to get their engine to where it is today. From the basic engine they built for Warcraft 3, then extended to the first WoW, then upgraded several times, and oh yes, they're also sitting on a rather large pile of money so they can have people on optimising it full-time if they so desire.

 

This stuff isn't simple. Complain if you must, but constructive requests for 'when I do X, it's awfully slow, and here are some reproduction steps' is a heck of a lot more useful. For what it's worth, I empathise with those having difficulties - it would just be nice if people presented their case in a manner that is likely to yield anything done about it.

 

yes and some of these people compare how smooth wow runs compared to this game without taking into account that wows system requirments are way lower than that of tors.