The Unofficial TOR and Boot Camp Discussion Thread

[Mellachi]

First a merry christmas to everyone!!!

 

I have a 2007 iMac 2.4GHz core duo with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 256MB & 4GB ram. I am running XP and the Omega drivers mentioned earlier in the thread and with all the settings set to the lowest and am actually enjoying the game. If your machine is newer than 2007 then yes, you can run it.

 

and the game run smoothly on your system? So by all accounts eventhough my resolution is 2560x1440 I should at least be able to run to game on low settings perfectly.

 

What can I do to remedy this?

 

thanks!

[breezytrees]

Found a fix guys.

 

Use AMD catalyst's video settings and have them overwrite SWTOR's application settings.

 

I think the magic box to check in catalyst is "enable triple buffering," but the other settings I have are as follows:

 

Smoothvision anti-aliasing: Use application settings

Smoothvision:anisotropic filtering: Use application settings

Morphological filtering: disabled

Tessellation: AMD optimized

Texture Filtering quality: quality

Surface format optimization: enabled

Wait for vertical refresh: Off, unless application specifies

Anti-aliasing mode: multi-sample AA

OpenGL settings: Triple buffering enabled

 

I'm running a modified version of AMD's 12.1 preview drivers, but I don't think it helps much. The drivers are modified to support graphics switching. I never saw a performance gain jumping up. Only when I changed some settings within catalyst did I see improvement. I recommend tooling around in catalyst first before you resort to upgrading to 12.1

 

My 2.2 ghz quadcore mbp is now running SWTOR like butter at 1900x1200.

 

edit: after a 2 hour test. Definitely *not* smooth as butter. Lowering reso does not improve performance. It is definitely better. It is smooth outdoors. Becomes barely playable in interior areas.

Edited December 25, 2011 by breezytrees

[Mellachi]

Cool, will try as soon as possible. (Currently on holiday).

 

What are the other specs of your system, videocard, cpu?

[mcgross]

sorry if this is just ridiculously dumb, as everyone seems to know what it is already haha,

 

but where can i download amd catalyst?

 

or is it on my mb already?

 

been running full graphics on a macbook pro 2010 standard edition 13 inch without grass or trees on high detail, with low quality shadows, and been getting 30-35fps consistently. just got to taris, and now my fps is terrible. averaging 4-5fps and freezes every three seconds...

 

just thought i'd share

Edited December 25, 2011 by mcgross

[wibblefish]

Does anyone else have any performance tweaks they could share, maybe via the ini file?

 

Experiencing overall framerates are very poor on my late 2010 macbook pro (i7 core, 8gb ram, 330m nvidia chip) averaging around 10 - 20ish though spiking up to 50 - 75 sometimes with everything turned down to low or off in game and everything set to performance on the nvidia control panel with the latest drivers.

 

I was hoping I could play it relatively smoothly with everything turned down as my machine is only a year old or is this choppy and sluggish gameplay about what I should expect?

 

Pulling my hair out slightly as I would love to play

 

Thanks for any help

Edited December 26, 2011 by wibblefish

[Kuuzon]

Hey all

 

I'm running an '08 iMac with following specs (bootcamp):

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo @2.66GHz

OS: Windows 7 (64-bit)

RAM: 4GB

VIDEO: nVIDIA GeForce 9400

 

At the min, the game is playable, but a little annoying. FPS generally hovers round the 20fps mark, but in the opening of Taris and some indoor cutscenes, drops to as low as 5-10fps.

 

All my settings are set to low, shadows off and I stopped all non-critical windows functions to crank the performance of the CPU.

 

Im a novice when it comes to software, so have no idea how to update drivers (do i do it windows or mac side?) and fiddling a bit with GPU settings.

 

I suspect the graphics card is the problem - as most peeps with the NVIDIA Gf 9400 have similar issues./

 

Any help would be great!

[MPagano]

This is a bit of a departure from most of this thread so far. However, I have no in-game sound. (I also have the issue of stretched graphics making the game unplayable, but I'm going to try the Omega driver suggestion tomorrow).

 

The sound plays in the launcher when it's finished file checking, but once I log into the actual game there's nothing.

 

Some have had this issue with a number of different cards which was remedied by opening the sound card control panel and changing a certain option.

 

I have a 2010 iMac with the Cirrus Logic sound card. As far as I can tell, there is no panel where I can change any settings for this card. I've tried updating the drivers, but they appear to be up to date. Does anyone have this card or is familiar with ways to adjust settings on it?

[lavudyar]

There's another post here about the sound, you need to d/l some older driver but I got it to work fine on my 2007 iMac.

 

And the Omega driver totally fixes the stretched toons.

[Tuza]

girlfriend is having problems on her imac. Late 2009 24" imac desktop with a nvidia 9400 video card. We updated the drivers to an October release, still getting 15fps or fewer. Averaging around 7fps in the dark temple on DK.

 

No luck so far making this better =/ We'll be dropping the game if we can't get the fps up...I mean, everything's on low now, and 7fps is the best we can do? /sigh

[cthipphavong]

@tuza and kuuzon

 

Upgrade your ram to 8gb. I play on a mac mini with the 9400 chip. The beta was unplayable with 4gb of ram but much better with 8gb. Still a little laggy in huttball and crowded cities but still fun to play. 8gb of ram should only cost $30 or $40 and improve your experience a lot

[winman]

Hi, I just installed bootcamp with Windows 7 Ultimate, then installed TOR. But when I try to launch it after signing in, it gives me an error saying to check that my system is compatible with the game, system error 7. Is there something I messed up? Has anyone else had this problem? Thanks in advance.

[JakeThomasC]

Same exact thing happened to me.

[Winmi_Kinfor]

I'm currently running a brand new copy of Windows 7 that I just got on a 2010 Macbook Pro 13" through boot camp. I installed the drivers that came with the start up disk so that windows works properly and my install of TOR was flawless. However, as soon as I click play I get Error Code 7 and it says my system isn't compatible. My system meets the minimum requirements (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 4 GB of Ram, Windows 7) but it still won't work. Does anyone have any advice that could help me solve this issue?

[daemian]

Guys, I've been reading through the posts and a lot of the problems I'm seeing here are not limited to just Boot Camp installs, but are related to Windows in general.

 

Check the general customer service forums as well as this thread, you might find some more info there.

 

A few links...

 

Hot Issues: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=275

Error Code 7: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=35738

Low FPS Issue: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=647049#post647049

 

Seems like the low FPS problem at least is something Bioware is trying to fix across the board.

Edited December 29, 2011 by daemian

[iPawl]

So, after years of loathing not to install Windows, I was intrigued by BioWare's SWTOR, and was fairly disappointed by the lack of Mac client (Blizzard softened me up, yes).

 

Anyway, Boot Camp set up, and it pains me every time I have to log-out Mac OS X to get into Boot Camp, so to all the Mac haters out there - Yes, our Windows machine runs fine, the only problem is that we cannot stay on OS X to play.

 

I have a 2011 MBP:

HD 6750M 1GB

8GB DDR3 Ram

 

Frames were not so good, since I have a Thunderbolt display, and running the game at 2560*1440 (native res) takes a really good hit on the frames.

 

Now I'm playing at a res of 1920*1080 - with High textures/High anisotropy/High character detail - but with Shadows off (this is the real frames killer, the Shadows), and giving up 15-20 frames for Shaders and Bloom (another 5-10 frames) isn't worth it, so disabled those.

 

I am sitting on 45-65 frames, which is good and it's keeping me satisfied, considering that I'm running the game off my display.

 

I didn't get the performance right from the start, but little tweaking here and there got me desired frames. Running at a lower res, and putting down anisotropy can give you far more frames, with little less impact on the quality side.

 

To all AMD/ATI users, it will not be a simple find to install the latest drivers out there. Apple, and many other OEM notebooks do not release one single update to their drivers after the actual launch for the product. Fortunately, AMD still releases the drivers, but you have to do some digging around to find the link. I did find the link, so all you have to do is download the link here: (http://www2.ati.com/drivers/mobile/11-12_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc_ocl.exe) update and enjoy.

 

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's even possible to update the drivers for an Nvidia based card - any Nvidia mac users care to share would be great. Driver updates really help in some cases with performance and stability.

 

I also found out that letting Windows run it's course and follow through with Windows updates (and boy it takes a lot of restarts to have them all - also gives more stability).

 

I still miss my Mac, because all I do when I'm at home is play SWTOR now.

 

May the force be with you, until we might get a proper Mac client, we're stuck with this.

[daemian]

I did find the link, so all you have to do is download the link here: (http://www2.ati.com/drivers/mobile/11-12_mobility_vista_win7_64_dd_ccc_ocl.exe) update and enjoy.

 

Quick question: what version of the catalyst driver is this linking to? This may be the correct driver for your Mac (6750m) but a little more info is needed. I'd caution anyone before downloading and installing a random .exe file.

[wibblefish]

Most of the noticable drop offs in fps seem to occur inside buildings or when viewing any part of the skyline from what I can tell, other than that it seems reasonable. I have tried overclocking my gfx card a bit and whilst that helps I'm not to comfortable with it as it seems excessive for one game!

 

As the building fps issue is already being investiagted by bioware does anyone know of a way to change the default draw distance?

[MPagano]

I've tried the omega drivers that worked for many others in this thread (squished, fat 3d graphics error). Unfortunately, this did not work. I had trouble with the install, and basically had to force it manually through device manager.

 

What's strange to me is that I've tried 4 different versions of AMD drivers in the past 2 weeks. Many people with similar or the same systems have had success in resolving the issue using one of these solutions, but I still have none.

 

No matter how cleanly I uninstall an old driver and install a new one, the driver version and date is always the same when I check its properties. In other words, I can uninstall the components completely (add/remove programs, device manager uninstall, ddriver sweeper), reboot with no recognized display driver, and install successfully (whether it be omega drivers, catalyst performance 11.11a, etc.). But no matter which drivers I use, when I do a clean install, they show the same version every time- 8.7....

 

People who resolve the issue claim to install 8.9, but I literally can't find such a thing anywhere. I use the same mirrors to download as they do, the same .exe and everything. It's like my computer cannot upgrade beyond 8.7 something.

 

I'm running bootcamp v3.2 (the most current version available for snowleopard OS running XP 32 bit). Others have resolved the issue with the same setup, so I'm not sure what's wrong with my system. I'm about to call AMD, but I don't think they'll be much help. The only thing I can think of for a potential solution is to buy and install Windows 7 in hopes that I can update bootcamp and maybe install a more current driver with the new OS. However, I'm hesitant to spend $100 on a speculative answer.

 

Any help? At this rate, I'm going to have to try and return the game (which I don't think will be possible). I've waited 4 years and did everything in my power to make sure I could run this, and I'm finally starting to think that it's just not possible.

[daemian]

What's strange to me is that I've tried 4 different versions of AMD drivers in the past 2 weeks. Many people with similar or the same systems have had success in resolving the issue using one of these solutions, but I still have none.

 

Upgrading to Windows 7 64-bit will give you one advantage - it'll allow you to access more RAM, which should help with performance in TOR.

 

You've probably already seen this, but just in case:

http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/GPU-2-ATICatalystSuiteDriverXP.aspx

Edited December 29, 2011 by daemian

[usairways]

Yeah I'm running on my MacBook Air. (I have a windows gaming desktop I normally play on when I'm in college). The biggest issue I have is sometimes it doesn't load so I have to minimize the screen and then open it up again to have it reload and then it works. Its laggy even though I'm on the lowest settings possible, but at least I'm getting my fix.

[daemian]

Just thought I'd post a link to the thread on speeding up performance in Windows 7, some really good tips here for anyone new to Windows:

 

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1198

 

I've also used a free app called Game Booster, whcih works as advertised and is very easy to use.

Edited December 30, 2011 by daemian

[DerkXD]

Hey im running SWTOR on Bootcamp and it worked fine for a couple of days but today i got d/c and now the launcher wont open. i cant figure out what the problem is >.>

[mosesface]

I am having some major problems with crashing. I have tried to update the drivers as needed, but really ran into some problems. I have an early 2010 27" iMac.

[ineidzcode]

I created a tutorial for installing the newest Catalyst Drivers in Boot Camp on Windows 7 which GREATLY increased my FPS.

 

Find Thread Here

[Thiussat]

I would be more interested in whether people have gotten SWTOR working in WINE. Anyone, anyone?