I have absolutely no idea why this happens. It used to be just Huttball, but now it's everyt map, even arenas. The second I start doing something, even when there's only me and one enemy on the screen, it drops like a meteorite.

Could be your PC. Or your GFX Card dying.

I have absolutely no idea why this happens. It used to be just Huttball, but now it's everyt map, even arenas. The second I start doing something, even when there's only me and one enemy on the screen, it drops like a meteorite.

Wrong subforum.

If other games you play run fine, ruling out a sudden problem with your PC then you probably just have a slow PC and on slower PCs Swtor may run fine sometimes and lag badly other times even on same map. On fast PCs (cpu wise btw) whatever causes random lag isn't enough to affect them since they have lots of headroom.

Nope, this is the right forum because this doesn't happen outside of warzones. If I can run Crysis 3 on high settings, there's no reason this prehistoric engine should make trouble. As I said, this happens only in warzones and not just to me, I've talked with 5-6 other people and they experience the same thing.

Nope, still wrong, you want the support forum but I will indulge you for now.

You haven't listed your PC specs and haven't displayed any real technical knowledge. What you likely have in common with those people are slow cpus, you may well be able to Crysis 3(so could my old, slow pc) but your line of reasoning is severely flawed. Being able to play one game doesn't mean you can play all games, Crysis 3 is an order of a magnitude more efficient at rendering graphics than SWTOR, it isn't massively bottlenecked by CPUs.

If you used the search function you would know that lots of people have poor performance in SWTOR despite performing well in other, more graphically demanding titles. The reasoning is simple, SWTOR is an old engine, which isn't actually a good thing for performance and because it uses an old engine it can have serious CPU bottlenecks whereas newer games like Crysis 3 use the DX11 API, have decent multi-threading support and are well coded.

Warzones are one of the most demanding parts of the game btw, my old PC with a cpu from 2009 could play other parts of the game at 60 fps but would get 20-40 fps in warzones while being able to play Crysis 3 at 1440p, since I had a highend videocard.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but that doesn't explain why this stuff started happening since yesterday. I've been playing since the trial program hit live and I've never had such crap performance except when around the fleet's GTN on peak hours with friendly player nameplates turned on. Please understand, I'm not talking about a freeze here and there during a full showdown between both teams. The second we are able to leave the spawn zone, the framerate pummels to the ground.

P.S. The support here is about as useful as a gas bottle in a forest fire so I won't even bother asking them for help.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, but that doesn't explain why this stuff started happening since yesterday. I've been playing since the trial program hit live and I've never had such crap performance except when around the fleet's GTN on peak hours with friendly player nameplates turned on. Please understand, I'm not talking about a freeze here and there during a full showdown between both teams. The second we are able to leave the spawn zone, the framerate pummels to the ground.

P.S. The support here is about as useful as a gas bottle in a forest fire so I won't even bother asking them for help.

I've found performance on SWTOR can change drastically for no reason when you have an older CPU, please list your specs and I could give you a few tips, one of them is try turning shadows completely off.

My old pc with a Phenom II 965 overclocked to 4ghz would sometimes run warzones at 45 fps or so with shadows on low or off(they kill perf on slow cpus) and sometimes I would have to quit playing for that night because I'd be getting 15 fps or less without a reason I could discern, though it would usually start be at least a little crap in spawn area but once spells etc started being casted my FPS would tank.

GTX 570 videocard, i7-2600k cpu, 8 gigs of RAM.

That's an older cpu(compared to skylake) but you might want to try lowering or turning off the shadows and the usual things like making sure you have latest forceware drivers.

Have you played Crysis 3 or other games since the problem started happening? If we can isolate the performance problem to SWTOR then we can totally rule out pc issues and look at things like if the server you're on is lagging for you and just lowering the graphics settings in SWTOR, the graphics settings don't really increase the load on your GPU, most of them just make your cpu work harder, SWTOR as I mentioned above is old and not well optimized.

Well, I just tried doing a 16m run and the performance was even worse. Thanks for the interest but I'm positive it's not hardware problem. Don't have Crysis 3 right now, but BF3 runs just as smooth. I was planning on taking a break from the game anyway, seems like this is the time.

16m ops are going to have similarly bad performance to warzones due to number of the characters.

Just try my suggestions- turn shadows off if they're on high, that could easily double your frame rate.

For us it seems like framerate is consistently ~60 fps when I track it, but some things cause the game to chug along. One thing in particular is mercenary healers. Why this happens I can only guess, but maybe because of all of the effects it needs to render for that particular discipline. In 4 person fp it's noticeable, and in warzones or ops it's like I tried to divide by zero or something.

Another one is oddessen, and this is the only area I can think of (even fleet isn't this bad despite the dozens of ppl everywhere) but whenever we go it's clearly struggling. When I check the FPS, it will appear fine (60) and then the second I face the gravestone/jungle it will plummet then quickly recover.