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Horrid FPS


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gscheida's Avatar


gscheida
01.21.2012 , 09:01 PM | #571
/push

Enyxian's Avatar


Enyxian
01.21.2012 , 09:01 PM | #572
I reinstalled SWTOR (one whole day gone) and managed to get better frame rates with AA on all settings maxed out at 6040x1080 resolution. Shadows, trees and grass at max too.

In most areas including Imperial fleet, I get a comfortable 70-110fps, but there's minimal tearing and microstuttering. But the moment I go through the galaxy map on my ship, I get SWTOR.ppt running a slideshow.

Alt-tabbing to Windows and going back in fixes it. From 8fps to 100fps. This is what I do every time I do space missions or travels.

Riding mounts and then attacking mob/summoning companions see heavy losses. But rising mounts and then attacking jobs without summoning companions is fine. Opening bags or menu causes microstutter.

Also, sometimes I get texture issues like artifacting even though my temps are fine. Hoth looked like Dr Seuss's worst nightmare with jagged mountains that shouldn't be there and see through floors and flat sky that appear out of nowhere. Same goes for Tatooine and Taris.

Frame rates don't suffer during these phenomenon though. PC specs at sig.

Cheers. /hugs a panda for comfort
i7 3960X 3.3ghz | Asus Rampage IV Extreme | 16GB RipjawsZ 1600mhz | Corsair Force GT 120GB | GSkill 60GB Phoenix Pro SSD + Western Digital Caviar Black SATA 2.0TB + Western Digital Green 2.0TB | HP dvd1270 | Corsair AX1200 Gold | Corsair Obsidian 800D | 3x Dell U2311H 23" WS HD IPS LCD + Asus GTX 590 Quad SLI

Eugeon's Avatar


Eugeon
01.21.2012 , 09:07 PM | #573
That said, what matters is that we fix it. Even if two thirds of our players claimed it doesn't happen, we still fix it. Serious problems don't require a majority vote to get addressed.


-- Georg

tmpearson's Avatar


tmpearson
01.21.2012 , 09:08 PM | #574
If I am on my speeder and then do something like summon a companion, my game stops for a few seconds.

ThisBrownMan's Avatar


ThisBrownMan
01.21.2012 , 09:36 PM | #575
well 20fps in warzone is the new 60fps

yotoden's Avatar


yotoden
01.21.2012 , 09:37 PM | #576
Quote: Originally Posted by Dexxius View Post
Original Post:
http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1992038
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wakantanka

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.

your rigs are fine guys, it's bioware.
I second this.

I have a fair amount of computer experience myself and spent alot of time tracking the issue and noticed a direct correlation between the fps drops and the loading of the texture files. I used sysinternals process explorer and a couple other tools to track it.

My fix was finally this, i use hibernate so I reboot the machine after coming out of hibernate, start the launcher and login, do not press play, instead use the repair option, the press play. Sometimes it doesnt work then i have to log out to character screen, then quit, reboot, login, repair and then play.

What i tracked was the game not closing resources properly so the reboot closes the file pointers and the repair corrects the corrupted teture files.

Your mileage may vary as you might want to make sure you have a good hd that is optimized along with doing a disk defrag... also wierdly sometimes turning off superfetch improves things.

Its definately something wrong with the engine.

sac-'s Avatar


sac-
01.21.2012 , 09:44 PM | #577
Quote: Originally Posted by Eugeon View Post
That said, what matters is that we fix it. Even if two thirds of our players claimed it doesn't happen, we still fix it. Serious problems don't require a majority vote to get addressed.


-- Georg
Nice joke.

Acelot's Avatar


Acelot
01.21.2012 , 10:02 PM | #578
Quote: Originally Posted by yotoden View Post
I second this.

I have a fair amount of computer experience myself and spent alot of time tracking the issue and noticed a direct correlation between the fps drops and the loading of the texture files. I used sysinternals process explorer and a couple other tools to track it.

My fix was finally this, i use hibernate so I reboot the machine after coming out of hibernate, start the launcher and login, do not press play, instead use the repair option, the press play. Sometimes it doesnt work then i have to log out to character screen, then quit, reboot, login, repair and then play.

What i tracked was the game not closing resources properly so the reboot closes the file pointers and the repair corrects the corrupted teture files.

Your mileage may vary as you might want to make sure you have a good hd that is optimized along with doing a disk defrag... also wierdly sometimes turning off superfetch improves things.

Its definately something wrong with the engine.
any more testing and confirmation ?
I am already unsubbed.

ChaosBlades's Avatar


ChaosBlades
01.21.2012 , 11:03 PM | #579
Quote: Originally Posted by yotoden View Post
I second this.

I have a fair amount of computer experience myself and spent alot of time tracking the issue and noticed a direct correlation between the fps drops and the loading of the texture files. I used sysinternals process explorer and a couple other tools to track it.

My fix was finally this, i use hibernate so I reboot the machine after coming out of hibernate, start the launcher and login, do not press play, instead use the repair option, the press play. Sometimes it doesnt work then i have to log out to character screen, then quit, reboot, login, repair and then play.

What i tracked was the game not closing resources properly so the reboot closes the file pointers and the repair corrects the corrupted teture files.

Your mileage may vary as you might want to make sure you have a good hd that is optimized along with doing a disk defrag... also wierdly sometimes turning off superfetch improves things.

Its definately something wrong with the engine.
I third this. Since I have not post my info since last thread here is the latest revision...

If it is due to how many players are around you then why does my fps in my ship go down to 15-34fps randomly?

I was able to get 40-50fps in the highest populated area of Dalaran (Bank) on a full server with WoWs what 2003 engine? Why am I getting 24fps on the Imperial Fleet on a 2011-2012 game?

i7-960 @ only 3.3Ghz currently (4.2Ghz did nothing to FPS)
12GB RAM @ 2000Mhz (9-9-9-2T)
2x EVGA GTX 570 SC @ 900/1800/2280 (a little faster than stock GTX 580s) VRAM never maxes out by a few hundred MB
2x Crucial 128GB C300 SSD in RAID 0
ASUS Rampage III Formula X58 Motherboard
EVERYTHING is latest software/driver/bios versions to this date. Clear down to WinRAR.

BF3 completely maxed out fps @ just under 120fps constantly

Playing SWTOR:

55-65ms latency at all times.

Open World: around 110fps (GPU:75% Highest CPU core: 50%) Poorly optimized....

Ship (Fury): Center of the ship I get around 12-18fps sometimes most times I get 24-30fps. in the rooms of the ship I get 60fps. About 25% of the time I get 60fps in the center of the ship also.

Imperial Fleet: In the center I get around 24fps. The farther I get from the center the higher the fps goes. It is also low around the galactic market. On a low server population I was able to get 40fps with around 10 people around me.

Warzones: I have not been as of yet.

All times it has ever gone below 60fps not a single core on my CPU goes above 30% and my GPU does not go above 25%. I have also tried several different driver versions.

*When I mention 60fps V-Sync is on.

Here is DxDiag...

Spoiler

rednekx's Avatar


rednekx
01.21.2012 , 11:30 PM | #580
I mean no offense to any previous posters, but I can't believe how many people in this thread say they haven't been in a War Zone.

Reason 1:
What else is there to do in MMOs besides PVP

Reason 2:
You really haven't seen the frustration this issue causes until you have seen it in a War Zone.


Open world FPS problems: Your settings are wrong or your PC is to blame. I get 60 - 111
Fleet FPS problems: it annoying, but some can live with it. I get 25-40 in Fleet
War Zone FPS problems: GAME BREAKING FOR PVPERS

There is something obviously wrong when my GPU and CPU drop to 30% utilization while i am getting a 10FPS slideshow.

What's even better is I FINALLY got a reply back from the ticket I opened on this.

The protocol droid super-genius replies:

"We would advise that you check your in game settings"
"You can also try an alternative server"


I got an idea. How about I try an alternative game....

PS: As for FPS in Flashpoints? I wouldn't know, I have never been in one
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