Do you think it's possible their warden system could be taking a hit on performance?

I know with many newer PC games (The Witcher), the DRM would completely kill the FPS.

From what I read, they didn't add warden to the game until official launch. That would explain beta clients running smoother than retail.

Isn't "warden" basically just a more advanced DRM?

Stephen Reid's explanition makes perfect sense. One thing that I noticed right away in playing SWTOR is the pure number of dog legs in the level design. This is typically done for performance reasons to reduce the number of objects (mainly objects that move and need to be rerendered, such as other players or mobs) that need to be rendered by the client.

WoW does this as well in Ironforge, Stormwind, basically all major cities. GoW, Halo, also employ the same technique.

Just look for hallways or walls that limit your frustum.

To Stephan........ and well everyone else who has been participating in this thread since the start

The reason why people think there is more to what you are saying comes down to performance

you have high end machines that are struggling with low res textures, other mmo's run fine, high end games i.e. battlefield 3 run fine. swtor struggles in fleets and in open world. the game chugs like its loading assets (paging issue it seems) and as a result you are down to 20fps.

Most people can't fathom how the game could be released when it runs so bad. Some (myself included) could let this slide if it was running high res textures and that's what was causing low performance (as per your 1st post/explanation on textures)

The fact is, the game is running low res textures, looks ugly, and is bringing down rigs with 12-16gigs of ram running i-7's and high end videocards in sli/xfire to its knee's

This is normal? Then you or someone else from bioware on a joystix interview say that its our rigs that are the problem.

This is why we think there is wayyyy more to the story then you and bioware are saying. There are too many holes in your story.

Don't get me wrong, i love swtor but my god the engine runs terrible

Bioware.. we are not console gamers, we aren't sheep. We are pc gamers. We are smart and will find problems and call you out on them....

Not much fun depending on yoru play style.

Yeah I have some friends that play on WoW private servers

Not a fan, personally

But my friends still play on there instead of resubbing to WoW, /shrug

Oh and @ the guy above me

take off the tinfoil hat

Interesting, but if they were being decrypted and loaded into memory during the load time, it shouldn't cause any further performance issues. The second process doesn't generally use enough memory for it to be storing a large amount of assets, so if they were, for example, being unpacked into it and then rendered into the client as we've been discussing, it'd have to be a relatively small proportion of the total assets at worst.

 

Could the high disk i/o be connected with the texture difficulties Mr. Reid explained earlier?

I'd imagine it would be decrypting into the large cache files, which it seems to be given their activity during loading. If the decryption local server dumped to memory, you'd basically be doubling memory usage as the actual game process also loads the assets into memory.

The cache files stay the same size, so it would be pushing out old data as new data comes in. The assets loaded ahead of time would not include all the needed character textures since it couldn't anticipate them. This would explain the bursts of HD activity during gameplay.

And yes, I'd say the two are very linked. I've never heard of a game that was able to run high res textures removing the option later. PC gamers know that they have to tweak their video options to get a good experience. So there must be a reason that they are removing the ability for us to use these. Since it has been confirmed the assets aren't being streamed over the internet, then they are still on the local installations. Basically I'm speculating that the remote calls for decryption keys are causing too much load on the servers, so they reduced the number of calls via texture atlases, with a downside being loss of quality.

I went to Oxford and got a doctorate in underwater basket weaving

So I think I'm qualified to say that BW will fix this

I LOLed so hard

So high quality textures on the character is bad because MMO engines cant handle it, or just ToR's engine, here in 2012?

An engine created nearly 4 years ago (probably more). Just saying.

since i know bioware for so long, actually they are 1 of the only company that ONLY THINKS FOR THE GAMERS, not for the CASH and thats practicaly proved by the years

Get real.

I'm going to ask the development team to look into this, but I'd ask you to pull back on some of the more extreme speculation. Posts like this do not help us to have rational informed discussions about the issues that we are facing.

 

There is, to my knowledge, no single DLL that's responsible for a multitude of problems across the game. For example, our 'ability delay' issue is being addressed by the development team right now, and I've been told there are dozens of fixes potentially being looked at to help improve things. There's no single magic fix (although some fixes may have more of an effect than others).

 

I'll also say right now that we're not 'remotely rendering' textures and sending to your client via your internet connection; that would be some impressive technology and if we were doing it, is likely something we'd have talked about before now.

 

I'll seek developer comment on this, but I just want to caution anyone from overreacting.

To StephenReid........ and well everyone else who has been participating in this thread since the start

The reason why people think there is more to what you are saying comes down to performance

you have high end machines that are struggling with low res textures, other mmo's run fine, high end games i.e. battlefield 3 run fine. swtor struggles in fleets and in open world. the game chugs like its loading assets (paging issue it seems) and as a result you are down to 20fps.

Most people can't fathom how the game could be released when it runs so bad. Some (myself included) could let this slide if it was running high res textures and that's what was causing low performance (as per your 1st post/explanation on textures)

The fact is, the game is running low res textures, looks ugly, and is bringing down rigs with 12-16gigs of ram running i-7's and high end videocards in sli/xfire to its knee's

This is normal? Then you or someone else from bioware on a joystix interview say that its our rigs that are the problem.

This is why we think there is wayyyy more to the story then you and bioware are saying. There are too many holes in your story.

Don't get me wrong, i love swtor but my god the engine runs terrible

Bioware.. we are not console gamers, we aren't sheep.

We are pc gamers. We are smart and will find problems and call you out on them....

Full drive encryption can increase boot time substantially, but once the main system files are cached things are about normal.

 

That said, this encryption would be on specific assets, not runtime files (which are susceptible to such disk encryption slowdown). The bulk of required assets can be decrypted during the long planet load time. There are several large cache files in the game that have very high disk i/o during load times.

If such a thing as full drive encryption existed - as it is, it doesn't The MBR is NEVER encrypted

I went to Oxford and got a doctorate in underwater basket weaving

So I think I'm qualified to say that BW will fix this

Hahahahaha man that was funny:D

If such a thing as full drive encryption existed - as it is, it doesn't The MBR is NEVER encrypted

Haha, true, but it doesn't defeat the encryption. The drive firmware isn't encrypted, nor the label on the drive.

Hahahahaha man that was funny:D

Agreed I found that quite amusing...

Haha, true, but it doesn't defeat the encryption. The drive firmware isn't encrypted, nor the label on the drive.

Thus creating an efficient backdoor into anyones computer But the IT community has known this like forever... We just like to make ppl think they are "safe." lmao...

Furthermore, this whole idea of remote rendering has been around since 2007 so it is possible to do but will create a myriad of problems if not done in the correect fashion. As to whether or not BW is executing this correctly, well, we've seen what's going on now with the game and their Hero Engine so...

To StephenReid........ and well everyone else who has been participating in this thread since the start

 

 

The reason why people think there is more to what you are saying comes down to performance

 

you have high end machines that are struggling with low res textures, other mmo's run fine, high end games i.e. battlefield 3 run fine. swtor struggles in fleets and in open world. the game chugs like its loading assets (paging issue it seems) and as a result you are down to 20fps.

 

Most people can't fathom how the game could be released when it runs so bad. Some (myself included) could let this slide if it was running high res textures and that's what was causing low performance (as per your 1st post/explanation on textures)

 

The fact is, the game is running low res textures, looks ugly, and is bringing down rigs with 12-16gigs of ram running i-7's and high end videocards in sli/xfire to its knee's

 

This is normal? Then you or someone else from bioware on a joystix interview say that its our rigs that are the problem.

 

This is why we think there is wayyyy more to the story then you and bioware are saying. There are too many holes in your story.

 

Don't get me wrong, i love swtor but my god the engine runs terrible

 

 

Bioware.. we are not console gamers, we aren't sheep.

 

We are pc gamers. We are smart and will find problems and call you out on them....

QFT bro, QFT

Thus creating an efficient backdoor into anyone computer

BRB while I tear the "vulnerability stickers" off my hard drives D:

I'll also say right now that we're not 'remotely rendering' textures and sending to your client via your internet connection; that would be some impressive technology and if we were doing it, is likely something we'd have talked about before now.

 

I'll seek developer comment on this, but I just want to caution anyone from overreacting.

Pwnt!

To StephenReid........ and well everyone else who has been participating in this thread since the start

 

 

The reason why people think there is more to what you are saying comes down to performance

 

you have high end machines that are struggling with low res textures, other mmo's run fine, high end games i.e. battlefield 3 run fine. swtor struggles in fleets and in open world. the game chugs like its loading assets (paging issue it seems) and as a result you are down to 20fps.

 

Most people can't fathom how the game could be released when it runs so bad. Some (myself included) could let this slide if it was running high res textures and that's what was causing low performance (as per your 1st post/explanation on textures)

 

The fact is, the game is running low res textures, looks ugly, and is bringing down rigs with 12-16gigs of ram running i-7's and high end videocards in sli/xfire to its knee's

 

This is normal? Then you or someone else from bioware on a joystix interview say that its our rigs that are the problem.

 

This is why we think there is wayyyy more to the story then you and bioware are saying. There are too many holes in your story.

 

Don't get me wrong, i love swtor but my god the engine runs terrible

 

 

Bioware.. we are not console gamers, we aren't sheep.

 

We are pc gamers. We are smart and will find problems and call you out on them....

It is always funny when a community PR guy starts talking tech. because it always becomes blatantly obvious they have no idea what is going on or even what they are saying.

Stephen reid simply writes whatever he is told, that is his job, he is a corporate tool, he does not have any actual knowledge or education on the matter, nor do any of these PR guys, they simply do and say whatever they are told.

So....

swtor.exe PID 6772 (27 threads) waits for another process swtor.exe 2156 (16 threads)...

Say what you want the two process communicate with one another. Look at the wait chains or fire up wireshark and do the math.

Client side performance will take a hit regardless of settings because they are talking to one another. Who knows, and maybe it doesn't matter, but the end result is that there are two *.exe's running and they do communicate. It is a hop regardless of what happens and therefore a hit.

Not to put out the fire with gasoline, but could it be that there is underlying piece of ORIGIN running in the background while you run SWTOR?

Very unlikely, you can remove Origin and run SWTOR fine. They had enough trouble getting the engine to run with their own customizations, I think that was the saving grace that stopped Origin from being forced into the process.

So....

 

swtor.exe PID 6772 (27 threads) waits for another process swtor.exe 2156 (16 threads)...

 

Say what you want the two process communicate with one another. Look at the wait chains or fire up wireshark and do the math.

 

Client side performance will take a hit regardless of settings because they are talking to one another. Who knows, and maybe it doesn't matter, but the end result is that there are two *.exe's running and they do communicate. It is a hop regardless of what happens and therefore a hit.

Hmmm... one of the best suggestions I've seen so far. Wireshark is your friend Maybe we should examine the packets moving back and forth and see what is REALLY going on here.

So....

 

swtor.exe PID 6772 (27 threads) waits for another process swtor.exe 2156 (16 threads)...

 

Say what you want the two process communicate with one another. Look at the wait chains or fire up wireshark and do the math.

 

Client side performance will take a hit regardless of settings because they are talking to one another. Who knows, and maybe it doesn't matter, but the end result is that there are two *.exe's running and they do communicate. It is a hop regardless of what happens and therefore a hit.

I'm going to monitor the file activity of both processes and check the results. It will probably take awhile, though.