Jump to content

Just updated the video card...

Jagaimee

By Jagaimee
in New Player Help

 Share

Recommended Posts

Jagaimee

Jagaimee

Posted
Posted

...to, ironically, what was supposed to be a specifically-for-gaming video card. SWTOR is now a slideshow, whereas before it was a little laggy (but that went away with a few graphics settings) but very smooth and playable. My computer met all system requirements to play it, easily.

 

My new video card (please forgive me; I'm REALLY not knowledgeable about computers, so if this is entirely the wrong information, I'm sorry!) is a nVidia GeForce 7800 GT. I get the idea I've spelled that wrong somehow... gah. Anyway, is there anything within SWTOR - how its run, or the graphics settings themselves - or within my computer that I can change to make SWTOR work better with this new video card?

 

The CPU is Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz, if that helps any.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
psandak

psandak

Posted
Posted (edited)
The CPU is Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4Ghz, if that helps any.

 

Well there's your problem. SWTOR is CPU intensive not GPU intensive.

 

Also how much RAM do you have. If you have less than 8GB you need more (NOT video memory)

Edited by psandak
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Jagaimee

Jagaimee

Posted
  • Author
Posted
Well there's your problem. SWTOR is CPU intensive not GPU intensive.

 

Also how much RAM do you have. If you have less than 8GB you need more (NOT video memory)

 

I have 8GB of RAM. I'm not sure what you mean, there's my problem? My computer has never had a problem running SWTOR before this new video card. (Am I missing something very obvious here? :o)

Link to comment
Share on other sites
SteveTheCynic

SteveTheCynic

Posted
Posted
I have 8GB of RAM. I'm not sure what you mean, there's my problem? My computer has never had a problem running SWTOR before this new video card. (Am I missing something very obvious here? :o)

A 7800 is *old*. As in, practically paleolithic.

 

A 780 is much newer, but if someone sold you a 7800 as an upgrade, go hunt them down with a lawsuit for fraud.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
JediQuaker

JediQuaker

Posted
Posted (edited)
... SWTOR is now a slideshow, whereas before it was a little laggy

 

My new video card is a nVidia GeForce 7800 GT. .

I'd be curious to know what you were using before, as a graphics card. It was probably better than the GT 7800.

 

In any case, someone must of sucked you into buying that old piece of crap. The GT 7800 was a good gaming card about 10 years ago, but these days it's no better than the integrated graphics in newer CPUs.

 

Get yourself a new AMD RX 460 and that should do you for graphics for now. (Or maybe a GT 750 Ti)

 

Then you can work on upgrading that old Core2 Quad CPU to a new Skylake i5, because, as was mentioned above, SWTOR is very CPU intensive and it will run like crap on that CPU no matter what graphics card you have.

(Well, apparently it ran well enough for you in basic PvE, but PvP, OPs, and even crowded areas will be laggy)

Edited by JediQuaker
Link to comment
Share on other sites
psandak

psandak

Posted
Posted (edited)
I have 8GB of RAM. I'm not sure what you mean, there's my problem? My computer has never had a problem running SWTOR before this new video card. (Am I missing something very obvious here? :o)

 

It's not obvious. Something you may not have been told when researching/shopping for your new video card is that computer components are not 100% interchangeable; sometimes there are weird interactions between components.

 

My advice would be that if possible return the video card and use that money to purchase a new CPU/motherboard/RAM because that will give you a better performance boost playing SWTOR.

Edited by psandak
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Jagaimee

Jagaimee

Posted
  • Author
Posted

Ouch... Well, perhaps I can take some small comfort in that it was my dad (who took the computer in to get a problem fixed and ended up replacing the video card) who apparently got suckered, not me directly, since I wasn't there with him. Mistake number one? :o Still... Thankfully, it didn't cost very much.

 

Thank you for your advice, everyone!! (As for the Windows 10 - heh. I tried moving to Windows 10, and my entire computer basically had a heart attack. Back to Windows 8 for me, which runs SWTOR perfectly fine, apparently.)

 

I'll be looking for a newer (*cough* actually better this time *cough*) video card today. Here's hoping this one won't be over a decade old and terrible. :p As for upgrading the CPU itself, I'll look into it. Again, thank you so much, everyone!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
sumquy

sumquy

Posted
Posted (edited)
Ouch... Well, perhaps I can take some small comfort in that it was my dad (who took the computer in to get a problem fixed and ended up replacing the video card) who apparently got suckered, not me directly, since I wasn't there with him. Mistake number one? :o Still... Thankfully, it didn't cost very much.

 

Thank you for your advice, everyone!! (As for the Windows 10 - heh. I tried moving to Windows 10, and my entire computer basically had a heart attack. Back to Windows 8 for me, which runs SWTOR perfectly fine, apparently.)

 

I'll be looking for a newer (*cough* actually better this time *cough*) video card today. Here's hoping this one won't be over a decade old and terrible. :p As for upgrading the CPU itself, I'll look into it. Again, thank you so much, everyone!

 

i's not necessarily true that he got suckered. if he charged you $10 for the card and it fixed the problem, then that is a pretty good deal. are you sure it was a 7800? as others have said, that is an ancient card, and i would be surprised that whoever he took it to, even had one lying around. the other thing that posters pointed out is that swtor is a very cpu intensive game, but the part they left out is that the worse problem is engine optimization on the game side, that just never got done. i myself have a quad core i7 hyperthreaded to 8 cores and overclocked to 5.0ghz with lots of water to keep it cool. i have a gtx 980 graphics card that i am about to upgrade to a 1080 and 16 gigs of ram. with all of that i get ~80 fps by myself and ~20fps in anything with 16 players, i.e. wz or 16 man ops.

Edited by sumquy
Link to comment
Share on other sites
JediQuaker

JediQuaker

Posted
Posted (edited)
i myself have a quad core i7 hyperthreaded to 8 cores and overclocked to 5.0ghz with lots of water to keep it cool. i have a gtx 980 graphics card that i am about to upgrade to a 1080 and 16 gigs of ram. with all of that i get ~80 fps by myself and ~20fps in anything with 16 players, i.e. wz or 16 man ops.

That must be an older i7, like a 17-960 or i7-3770. I have an i5-6600, no overclock, and I get ~100fps by myself. I can't say what my fps in OPs or PvP is, as I haven't done any with this CPU.

It's worth noting that Hyperthreading has no benefit in SWTOR. In fact, you may find that you can gain a few fps by turning HT off (in SWTOR).

 

(P.s. not that it matters, but I'm running 16Gigs of DDR4 and an R9 390.) :)

Edited by JediQuaker
Link to comment
Share on other sites
psandak

psandak

Posted
Posted
i myself have a quad core i7 hyperthreaded to 8 cores and overclocked to 5.0ghz with lots of water to keep it cool. i have a gtx 980 graphics card that i am about to upgrade to a 1080 and 16 gigs of ram. with all of that i get ~80 fps by myself and ~20fps in anything with 16 players, i.e. wz or 16 man ops.

 

Funny thing I have an i7-3770 not HT and not OC (32GB RAM because I frequently run a lot of programs at once) and a gtx 550Ti 1.5GB vid card and I get only marginally lower frame rates. So I think JediQuaker is right...all that power is wasted on SWTOR.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
sumquy

sumquy

Posted
Posted (edited)
That must be an older i7, like a 17-960 or i7-3770. I have an i5-6600, no overclock, and I get ~100fps by myself. I can't say what my fps in OPs or PvP is, as I haven't done any with this CPU.

It's worth noting that Hyperthreading has no benefit in SWTOR. In fact, you may find that you can gain a few fps by turning HT off (in SWTOR).

 

(P.s. not that it matters, but I'm running 16Megs of DDR4 and an R9 390.)

 

pretty sure you mean gigs not megs, lol. anyway, the rest hasn't been true since the pentium 4 days. for older chips, the old hyperthreading method had to set up registers for smt for each thread, but with the i7 generation, that overhead was moved to the chip itself. single threaded programs no longer suffer a performance hit on multi-threaded cpus. your also wrong that swtor is not hyperthreaded. i have a program that will monitor the process running on each thread and i have seen swtor on as many as 4 simultaneously.

 

Funny thing I have an i7-3770 not HT and not OC (32GB RAM because I frequently run a lot of programs at once) and a gtx 550Ti 1.5GB vid card and I get only marginally lower frame rates. So I think JediQuaker is right...all that power is wasted on SWTOR.

 

it is wasted on swtor, but my point was that the problem is game optimization, not player hardware. this is demonstrated by the huge drop in fps when playing by myself vs.with 15 other players.

Edited by sumquy
Link to comment
Share on other sites
JediQuaker

JediQuaker

Posted
Posted (edited)

it is wasted on swtor, but my point was that the problem is game optimization, not player hardware. this is demonstrated by the huge drop in fps when playing by myself vs.with 15 other players.

So, you think that the CPU should be able to track 16 players, plus all the skill effects, etc, just as easily as 1 player? And that some magic "optimization" is suddenly going to get you 200 fps in all instances? Hold on to that dream. :)

 

I guess GW2 must be "poorly optimized" as well, since it also has huge fps drops during events, WvW (PvP) and raids. Also, GTA V and Ashes of the Singularity must be poorly optimized, because they require a lot of CPU power as well. :)

Edited by JediQuaker
Link to comment
Share on other sites
SteveTheCynic

SteveTheCynic

Posted
Posted
I guess GW2 must be "poorly optimized" as well, since it also has huge fps drops during events, WvW (PvP) and raids.

I can say for sure that it is way better at all those things than certain other games, including one that I dropped for other reasons around the time that GW2 was in late beta. Even in four-man dungeons, you had to be sure to use its costume management feature to hide certain wings. OK, it was partly because they were obnoxiously large (big quad bat- or demon-type wings, span probably about 15-20 feet, but they *looked* awesome with the right costume, a high dark priestess or hell-mage, say), but also because they caused hideous amounts of lag and fps loss.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...