Cripop Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 I see some people have mentioned this in the past and was wondering if anyone uses it now and if you guys get any increase with FPS in Warzones and OPs? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kunda Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 I just started using it yesterday. I've noticed a slight gain in FPS during warzones, especially in scenarios like Voidstar where everyone is mashed together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cripop Posted July 30, 2014 Author Share Posted July 30, 2014 Okay awesome. I am getting FPS drop bad in those situations. I have 8 gigs of ram is that enough for it? Where did you get it from? Was it hard to set up? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kunda Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 Okay awesome. I am getting FPS drop bad in those situations. I have 8 gigs of ram is that enough for it? Where did you get it from? Was it hard to set up? This thread here... http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=529567 has all of the information you'll need. It is very easy to set up, the application essentially does the work for you. Be sure to read the thread though, it does have some good tips if you run into any complications. 8 Gigs of RAM will be fine, just be sure to leave the 2.5GB for Windows and 512 MB available for Read/Write, so I wouldn't put more than 4GB on the Virtual Drive just to be safe. If you have any other questions let me know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cripop Posted July 30, 2014 Author Share Posted July 30, 2014 Okay I will do that. Thanks a lot Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
errant_knight Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 Yeah, it works, think is, the worse your computer, the more you'll notice. one thing to keep in mine...start the vanilla game to update the game, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cripop Posted July 30, 2014 Author Share Posted July 30, 2014 Well I am running a good PC. Intel I7 Qaud Core 2.2ghz 8 gigs ram 1 gig ddr5 AMD Radeon 6870. I am just so over this stupid FPS drop. It is driving me crazy Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chillshock Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 Yeah, it works, think is, the worse your computer, the more you'll notice. one thing to keep in mine...start the vanilla game to update the game, This is basically the most imporant thing to remember: Come patchday, you'll have to use the original launcher and NOT swtor unleashed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mighty_joe Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 This is basically the most imporant thing to remember: Come patchday, you'll have to use the original launcher and NOT swtor unleashed. actually you could use the unleashed launcher but make sure you use the "swtor retail" launch option. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Malastare Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 (edited) From what I remember, and what I understand as a developer for a dozen years: SWTOR Unleashed moves the game cache files into a RAM disk in an effort (a successful one) to improve the IO initiation times and IO throughput. As such, it's biggest effect will be on the resource load times for users who had been running the game with the game cache (normally in the User's appdata directory, which is usually on the system disk) on a spindle disk (ie: non-SSD). There would still be an improvement for users with SSDs, but it would be much smaller. The bulk of resource loads is done when entering a new zone, and that is when resource loading becomes a blocking action. Thus, SWTOR Unleashed biggest advantage is in speeding up the load times experienced when moving to a new zone. Things like generalized low FPS or FPS drops are not strongly tied to resource loading. They are usually linked to either GPU performance or CPU load. While speeding up the resource loading will take some load off the CPU, it's only a small effect. People complaining of FPS drops in warzones or ops are usually being limited by their CPU performance. The drops are associated with the sudden requirements to perform a large number of particle calculations or deal with a lot of collision-detection, neither of which require a lot of IO. However, IO is still occurring, so if your system has particularly bad IO performance and your CPU is already overworked, the effect will be more pronounced as it will open up more headroom on the CPU performance. Put more simply: If your FPS is normally on the low side (30fps) and you see drops to something like 10fps, then you might be able to smooth that out a bit. But its not going to help as much if you run at 60fps with drops down to 20fps and you're hoping to eliminate those drops. You might be able to raise the drops to 30fps, but it probably won't do much more than that. TL;DR: SWTOR Unleashed is mainly aimed at speeding up planet/zone transitions. It's not designed to improve FPS or eliminate FPS spikes. You'll probably see a minor improvement, but its not going to get rid of your FPS drops. Its just not what it was designed to fix. Edited July 30, 2014 by Malastare Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chillshock Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 Yeah. In the end the only three things can help with FPS: - drop your settings (yes, with shaders off it's butt-ugly) - Hope for bio to finally improve the game - get a new computer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Trevalon Posted July 30, 2014 Share Posted July 30, 2014 (edited) Yeah. In the end the only three things can help with FPS: - drop your settings (yes, with shaders off it's butt-ugly) - Hope for bio to finally improve the game - get a new computer The other day I fiddled with my settings for over an hour on Alderaan cause I was seeing some big drops in FPS there. The biggest improvement for the least amount of loss was turning down the Shadow Maps - especially from Very High to High - I honestly couldn't find the difference between Very High and High in that setting, I switched back and forth so many times and never could see the difference and I am pretty sure it just has to do with distance, but the Very High is so far away that you hardly notice. Turning it down to Medium was an even bigger jump in FPS but that had a noticeable difference in Shadow Quality for distant objects. Turning down Shadow resolution (The slider at the bottom) also has a huge impact on your FPS and FPS drops, but this one is somewhat more tricky. Honestly, I think it looks best either 100% on or 100% off. With it 100% all shadows are crisp and look real nice. With 100% off everything looks more blurred but it gives environment shadows a decent blur effect that actually doesn't look that bad - unfortunately the player shadow looks terrible at 0% and is the main reason I put it back to 100%. RIght now I am running everything on Max except for Shadow Maps, which I have on Medium - This jumped my avg FPS between 20 and 60 points (Inside I frequently get to the 110+ range - outside I stay right around 60, but rarely go less than 50.) In FP's and WZ's turning down max character's rendered will help there, but it makes other people look really crappy. Edited July 30, 2014 by Trevalon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
exca Posted August 3, 2014 Share Posted August 3, 2014 SWTOR Unleashed does help with FPS drops. It's why it's made. Since the games uses 7-9Gb of data in most areas, but can only hold 2Gb at the same time in RAM (since it's a 32bits program), it swaps data pretty often between RAM and the hard drive. SWTOR Unleashed let you choose which files you want to put in a side RAM drive where the game will read/write it instead of your hard drive, reducing highly FPS drops. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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