AMD CPU -> 0% GPU Load -> Low FPS

So um... My phenom x6, 460 se, 8 gb ram aren't enough as well? I know it isn't the best setup in the market, but something's very *********** wrong when bf3 runs on ultra and a warzone doesn't on low at lower resolutions than I can see... Not the game as a whole, JUST the warzone too.

Hi there forum helpers,


I got into PVP recently and I'm annoyed by the way my PC handles the Alderaan warzone. The heavy slowdowns caused from poor performance are noticable, right from the moment I hop on the speeder.

Got an AMD processor too:

While playing: I am getting a constant average of 17~ frames per second, using the statistic from CTRL + SHIFT + F command.

Staring at a wall: It climbs up to 50~ frames per second. It never hits 60 frames.


My PC specs:



Graphic Settings:

Graphics Menu Screenshot - Click Here

1920x1080
High Settings
Bloom Off
Shadows Off
Fullscreen (Windowed)
Vsync On

My frames per second do not improve if I disable Vertical Sync.


Thank you for your help!

This is all Bioware, they bought the engine source code back in 2005, they have heavily modified it and are the only ones who could maintain it properly at this point. They might be able to consult with the original creators (and they probably are) it may not even resemble the original code base enough for them to be helpful.

even if there is some obscure hardware bug, since it won't be fixed on existing machines and other games have managed to perform properly on the same hardware, then a software solution must exist.

It is possible a new graphics driver from both ATI and Nvidia could help things if it's just straight up something they are doing in direct3d that current drivers don't handle very well. ATI/Nvidia almost always detect popular games and translate certain graphics calls to something else that performs better on their hardware.

As a software engineer I am going to throw out my speculation based on some poking around using tools like Process Explorer.

The game is not CPU or GPU limited when in Warzones or other player heavy situations. Usually when you see this kind of behavior it means things are I/O bound. Both the CPU and GPU are waiting for either data from the hard drive or the network and doing nothing for short periods of time.

Games used to be single threaded and the same loop that does the rendering also processed network packets and read data from disk. If something was loaded from disk no frames where being rendering during that time, so most games had a loading screen and loaded everything into ram and made sure to never touch the disk again until the next load screen.

SWTOR is not single threaded, this is easy to know because it runs two processes, this means a minimum of two threads, but its actually much more, last time I looked both processes had 10+ threads each.

SWTOR is definitively loading assets from disk constantly probably because a whole planet cannot fit into the 2 gigabytes of address space a 32bit process has access to. A lot of software does this sort of thing, it typically called streaming, and there are a lot of approaches.

SWTOR is actually unusual in using two processes, I myself have never seen a game do this. In poking around its easy to see the main swtor.exe with the larger memory footprint is doing the network communication and playing the sounds while the secondary smaller swtor.exe is doing the direct3d calls and utilizing the GPU.

These two processes must communicate somehow and this is what makes things unusual for something like a game, because inter-process communication adds much overhead, even when using the fastest form called "shared memory".

It's seems no matter how fast your CPU or GPU is any time the disk is read in SWTOR the framerate will plummet, this is the random "hitching" you see when driving a speeder around, this means the disk access is blocking the rendering engine in some way. Other players exasperate the problem because of their varying outfits and models which must not be able to completely fit in ram and must be loaded/unloaded on demand, vs NPC which in a questing area are all wearing similar outfits etc.

You can tell SWTOR blocks on disk while a game like WoW doesn't because have you noticed in SWTOR you never see another player partially loaded? In WoW while the players assets are being loaded they may show up as just a "shadow" on the ground, you can see them moving around but the model hasn't been loaded yet. In SWTOR players "fade in" fully loaded which mean their models must be read from disk(or already be in ram if lucky) before the engine will continue. This may be intentional or a limitation in the engine design. I prefer WoW's approach of never blocking rendering even if on the rare occasion you might end up fighting nothing but a shadow while the model is loading(happens much less in wow because of simpler models allow more to stay in ram).

So the game is blocking on I/O, either network, IPC, or most likely disk leading to horrible FPS even on high end systems. SSD's will help the situation some, but even an SSD is still thousands of times slower than ram. And for those with 8-16gigs of ram, SWTOR is only 32bit with two processes, so it basically has a total of 4 gigs of usable address space and it seems that only one processes is really using it's 2 gigs, while the second renderer is only using about 300-400megs. There has been reports of setting up RAM disks for SWTOR's assets helping if you have lots of ram, which would line up with what I am seeing.

If this is the case what are the solutions?

1. Stop blocking on disk reads, this made leads to things like just seeing a blob shadow run by for a few seconds, but you can still control game and take action. This may or may not be easy to do given the engine design.

2. Merge the two processes. Again I have never seen a game do this, IPC adds overhead and latency that would not exist in a single process design.

3. Compile for 64bit. This may be difficult to do depending on the engine design, but a single 64bit process could use all the available system ram for caching assets greatly reducing disk I/O.

That is my educated guess based on what I know and what I have seen in game, it may be wrong, it would be nice to get a real response from a dev to clarify.

Hello players ,

There is a very good thread on the forum that is the potential reason for the issue I will try find a link .
But basically it says windows 7 and I think vista have some kind of gpu sharing software that the game currently deactivate ,The guy suggests right clicking the icon on the desktop go to properties and choose compatability then run in xp service pack 3 compatable mode this does not alter your operating system ,it just stopped the critical software being turned off.

Also go to the game file and do the same in the .exe. file on mine its the big game icon right at the bottom,once you do Both these your gpu will definitely start to be used .

An easy way to check is get the easy fast download of gpu-z.

Mine is at 100% load some of the time ,but I know I need an upgrade lol.