Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
SW devs saying it's my end for lag/DC not theres? or am I taking it wrong?
Hrica
Member UncommonPosts: 1,129
Hi everyone,
As promised, we wanted to address some of the hot topics in our community right now: FPS (frames per second) and other performance issues. We’ve spent a lot of time reading the forum threads on these topics, and the client team has analyzed many, many performance logs. They’ve also met over the past few weeks to discuss how to best address these topics, and now we want to open up the conversation with you.
Avi Mintz, the Associate Project Manager for the client engineer team, has digested some information together into the post below. Over to Avi:
Hi everyone!
As Joveth mentioned above, my name is Avi Mintz and I’m the Associate Project Manager for the client engineering team.
Developing an MMORPG of this scale and detail means we must support a wide spectrum of performance-impacting scenarios, varied hardware compatibility issues and other unique challenges. Input from our community goes a long way to bolster our investigation efforts and narrow down elusive resolutions to these problems.
To that end, we’re hoping that we can start an open dialogue with you, the community; some of you have called out for this, others have taken the time to publish write-ups, and we are looking forward to collaborating with you to make this game a fantastic journey and a memorable experience for all involved.
Please remember, we read the forums and identify actionable items as often as possible, as well as receiving reports from the Community team on a regular basis. Although we can’t always respond with the frequency or immediacy that you might like, whenever an issue is raised to us, a developer is alerted and assigned to the issue. We prioritize to ensure that the identified issues that affect the largest number of players are dealt with first, but we are always working on whatever we have outstanding.
In this post, I’ll get a little more detailed into our client preferences and suggest some settings changes that may help you. In the future, we’ll update you on our optimization plans as we address known issues. Now that you know a little bit more about our processes, let’s get started.
Game settings and what they mean for performance
Any given PC can bottleneck in a few different locations (processing power, available memory, graphics processing power, etc.). While changing graphics settings can have an impact on any or all of these, finding a ‘sweet spot’ for your system might take a bit of experimentation. Such experimentation is probably best approached by turning everything to ‘Low’, and then turning various features up selectively and noting the effect. We’ve broken down some of the less straightforward options for you here to give you some insight into the workings of our rendering options.
Min-spec shaders
The min-spec shader option allows faster rendering, at a reduced quality. This option also turns shadows and bloom off.
Shadows
Our shadow options are High / Low / None, where:
1. The ‘High’ option renders full shadows
2. The ‘Medium’ option renders only ‘blob’ shadow discs under characters.
3. The ‘None’ option removes even the ‘blob’ shadows.
As you might expect, your choice of shadow setting can heavily impact frame-rate. High shadows will be, comparatively, much more taxing on your system.
Textures
Our texture options are High / Low. We are planning an additional setting for character textures, closer to the quality seen in cinematic scenes, which is under development right now.
Anti-Aliasing
Our anti-aliasing options are High / Low / Off. Depending on your system, these options represent different levels of jagged edge smoothing.
Anti-aliasing is one of our more system-taxing features, and we do not recommend using it when running a video card with less than 1GB of memory. Keep in mind that the ‘performance cost’ is greater at higher resolutions.
Note: anti-aliasing is temporarily disabled for AMD 6900 series cards, due to severe graphical artifacts. We are working with AMD to resolve this bug, and we will re-enable the option for the 6900 series as soon as possible.
Resolution and Window mode
Window mode options are Fullscreen / Fullscreen (windowed) / Windowed, where:
1. ‘Fullscreen’ is what we refer to as ‘Fullscreen exclusive mode’. This option gives you the best frame-rate of the three, but it comes with a trade-off of having to reinitialize the display if you tab away from the game and back.
2. ‘Fullscreen (windowed)’ is really just a borderless window that stretches to fill your screen. You lose out on the slight performance gain of ‘Fullscreen’, but you can now tab back to the program seamlessly.
3. ‘Windowed’ is as straightforward as you might expect. If you feel that you’ve gotten the best frame-rate out of this setting, keep in mind that it all comes back to how much resolution you are prepared to sacrifice.
Minimum spec, recommended spec and performance
Error Code 7
Error code 7 is our way of reporting a game initialization failure – essentially, the game failed to run. There has been some speculation about this message being a ‘gate’ blocking players based on their system, but that is not quite accurate. Here are some situations that will result in an error code 7:
Missing technology that would cause an unplayable scenario. To be more specific, we require SSE3, introduced in late 2004.
Missing PlatformInfo.dll file (part of the SWTOR client).
Failure to create a Direct3D device – usually caused by an absent or outdated graphics card driver.
Note that this factor is not related to system processing capabilities, but rather fundamental system architecture (e.g. a 2011 netbook CPU might be able to run SWTOR while a 2004 desktop CPU might not).
If you’re receiving error code 7, but your system should be up to the task of running SWTOR, please contact us through Customer Service with the email tagline ’Error Code 7‘. We have introduced additional logging in patch 1.1.0 that can help us diagnose and pinpoint the source of failure.
Low FPS in the fleets, warzones and Ilum
We’re very aware of the frame-rate degradation that even top-notch systems experience in these gameplay scenarios. We’ve taken measures to control the overall impact that character-heavy scenarios can have on system performance, but there is always more we can do. We are constantly investigating and optimizing, and we are in the process of making changes to the fleets that have hopefully yielded some improvement.
Some of you have pointed out that your GPU is not being fully utilized when in these types of situations; we have found that character-heavy situations like these are usually limited by the CPU, not by rendering, so this makes sense.
Other changes you can make that will help improve performance:
We’ve read that some mobile graphics cards might not appropriately set their performance profile when running SWTOR. You can correct this by going to your graphics control panel and manually setting up a profile.
Disabling Windows Aero can also improve performance slightly.
And, of course, shutting down background programs can only help.
Client crashes
Our data says that, when measured as an average across all players, crashes during SWTOR gameplay are relatively rare. That being said, there might be some users that have the perfect storm of hardware, settings or activities that provoke repeated crashes in a way that we can practically diagnose and fix. If you experience consistent crashes, or if you know of a consistently reproducible one, please take a visit to this thread and post your information there – we’re always looking for more issues like this to fix, and increasing SWTOR stability will always be a top priority for our team.
We recently messaged that we fixed a frame-rate degradation problem that occurred when shadows were on ‘High’; this fix also greatly increased stability on 32-bit systems.
System failures
If your system consistently shuts down unexpectedly, please go to this thread and post your information. Some of you have already done this, and your posts have been extremely helpful. We’ve analyzed all the information you’ve provided so far, and this is what we can say…
SWTOR has the capacity to heavily utilize your system. If you are running the game with high graphics settings, this is especially true. System flaws or inadequacies that might not be evident when idling or playing other games could possibly be exposed when you are running SWTOR, especially in moments that put extra pressure on your system (PVP, Operations, etc.) To name a few things you should look out for:
1. Ensure that your power supply is not failing and that it supplies enough juice to power your system.
2. For temperature considerations, it’s also worth checking that the power supply fan is working properly. Also ensure that your PC case is properly ventilated and your airflow is unobstructed.
3. Ensure that your PC is clean and your system is not clogged with dust and dirt.
4. We recommend taking appropriate precautions (monitoring and cooling) if you are overclocking your hardware. Our advice is to dial things back to the manufacturer’s recommended settings until your system failures are resolved.
Blue Screens are displayed when Windows encounters a critical error. Errors of this nature are usually hardware or driver related.
1. We’ve provided some information here in the CS forums about ways to narrow down and identify the root cause of a given error. Windows tends to log this information, and those logs are a good point to begin an investigation.
For every visit you’ve made to the Forums to post constructively or inform us of an issue – thank you. Your DXDiags help us (even if you do forget to use spoiler tags sometimes!!) and we hope you’ll continue to work with us to make SWTOR great.
Joveth Gonzalez | Associate Online Community Manager
Follow us on Twitter @SWTOR |Like us on Facebook
[Contact Us] [Rules of Conduct] [F.A.Q.] [Dev Tracker]
ok I got this from the Offical forums..Am I reading it wrong or is my ..pretty good rig just not "good enough" or do they have a valid claim?
Comments
Could you post your rig?
On a related note, when the game was in Beta as well as at launch, I kept getting disconnected.
I initially thought it was on their end and even waited for it to get fixed but it never happened.
I put in a ticket and after some back and forth was told that it was on my end. This angered me until I did some troubleshooting on my end and realized that it had something to do with my wireless connection. I swtiched to using the ethernet cable and it immediatley fixed the issue.
Not sure if there is anything you can do on your end to verfiy if indeed it's you or them.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Not enough information to determine what your issue is, or whether it's due to something you're doing or something that BioWare is doing.
What you've posted sounds like a lot of general advice for getting the best performance possible out of the game.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
My cpu is a i7, got 4g of DDR3 ram and a ATI 4800 HD.
I know that my card needs replaced but are the requirments that high on SW to have disconection and chop all the time?
I have i7 16gb ram and ati 5870 and the game ran good in the questing area, but i was not at all satisfied at the fleet or pvp wz. It was playable but to be honest, not good enough.
Then you have others with the same spec that swear they have 0 issue with lots of people around em so who knows.
I have six core amd 3.3 processor, 16 GB ram, and geforce 560ti vid card; and Ilum is still a laggy hot mess... the issues are fully on Biowares side, I call BS anytime I hear them say "it may be your comp"...
AMD BE 3.2 quad, 6870 1gb, 8gb DDR3 1333 and the game runs great.
I would imagine, OP, that YES, that 4800 is far far too old to expect to be able to play the game at a reasonable frame rate.
My laptop supposedly met the minimum requirements, 2.1 ghz dual core, 4gb ram, ati mobile something video card - even on lowest of low settings the game churns out 2-3 FPS - completely unplayable.
Have you pvp'd on Ilum yet with 50-70 players? The framerate is horrendous...
what would be a good card to replace it that would not break my wallet?
To Zary - no not yet.
To Hrica - I got it on sale for 150 after rebate and a gift card I had - was an amazing deal. Card was about 230 base price though at the time.
I don't know how true this is, but I've always heard that AMD processors and ATI cards play nice, and Intel processors and Nvidia cards play nice - so if you have an i7 you should look into a Nvidia card > AMD.
560 is the comparable card in performance to the 6870 if I remember correctly.
Should be about 200 these days? Maybe a little more/less?
Also RAM is super cheap these days - you can pretty easily get 4gb to bring you up to 8gb total for like.. 30 bucks?
Obviously depends on your mobo and OS though.
Hey thanks, I will do that when taxes come back
Not trying to be smartass here, but any chance you could make it another color? A bit annoying to read, maybe it's just me, dunno.
edit: I got i7 CPU, and amd GFX, they love eachother, making sweeet love!
Spock, I dont know what level you are yet, but I would go and check Ilum out just for shiggles. head for the most populated battle areas and watch the FPS plummet... I find it amazing that in 2012, Bioware has FPS issues with 50 on 50 battles, when in Planetside we had quadruple those numbers in 2005-6 with zero lag...
The Hero Engine is poorly optimized and does not support more than 1 core by design.
Bioware Mythic have slapped in some code to make it use multi core cpu's, but it does so in an incredibly bad way. It will split up 1 cores worth of load across multiple cores, rather than actually fully using 2x, 4x or 6x.This is the sole reason why the so called 'hi rez textures' were taken out since regardless of your hardware it will still lag due to the engine being fundementally flawed. The funny thing is the beta 'high rez textures' were 1024x768 in most cases, which arnt true high rez by a very, very, long shot in the first place.
oddly there are many videos on youtube of large scale PvP in TOR on Illum, Belsavis, Tatooine etc. that have no issues at all.
It is important to specify the type of the core. Is it I7-800 series or 900 for example because there is a huge difference between them when it comes to accessing your RAM.
I went to check on your graphics card on amd.com and it does not seem to exist. they have 4830, 4850 and 4870. I could be wrong because I only checked amd.com.
I'm just trying to say if people ask to post your rig you need to be very specific otherwise people can't really help out.
Poor coding spawns poor explanations.
I'm running a rig that runs BF3 full settings @1920*1080 on 64 player maps with 40-60FPS (I have VSync on, hence max is always 60). And it runs at full settings all other MMOs I've played lately.
Short specs:
i7-860 LGA1156 (2.8GHz, built-in turbo @3.6GHz when needed)
16Gb RAM, 2000MHz factory specced
NVidia GTX570 graphics card
I've put the game cachefiles to RAM-disk, which btw improved performance quite a bit when loading chars or maps.
Latency is normally 60-80ms, my connection is dedicated 10/1 ADSL.
I've disabled AA and Shadows on SW:ToR. Yet this game gets huge performance hit to somewhere around 20FPS when there's 20+ players on my screen. The bright side here is, only occasions I have 20+ players in vicinity is in fleet where it doesn't really matter.
I CTD minimum of 3 times per gaming session. I'm aware it might be my rig, but then again this is the only game I'm having this issue so CBA to fiddle around for a game I won't be playing after two weeks.
i7 950 @ 3.2ghz, 12gb ddr3 ram @ 1333mhz, HD 6870 1gb vram.
Was running everything on max settings minus bloom and shadows but with forced x4 AA. Was getting 60fps everywhere in the game except fleet and alderaan WZ, there 20-40. Since last patch yesterday I get the same performance but with bloom and shadows turned on.
They're doing something right it seems.
It's a 4850. I had to get the box out of the closet.
In the original post I just ran the dxdiag command and it said 4800 series