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Horrid FPS


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Atanatar's Avatar


Atanatar
01.22.2012 , 02:34 PM | #671
I have also been experiencing bad FPS issues. I've had these issues since game launch but do not recall them occurring during beta.

I have a high-end rig on which I normally get great fps. However, I'll get huge FPS drops (sometimes pretty frequently) to < 10 FPS (more like 2 FPS...). I've observed this happen in all situations... including simply moving around in an empty room or standing idly on Vaiken spacedock. I will, however, note that it appears to happen more frequently (or is at least more noticeable) in warzones and flashpoints.

My latency looks great and I don't see anything out of the ordinary in performance tabs in the task manager. I've tried shutting off my firewall, lowering all settings to the lowest possible, etc. Nothing has helped or even changed the frequency in which it happened.

Here's my dxdiag:

Spoiler

LutzTrain's Avatar


LutzTrain
01.22.2012 , 02:46 PM | #672
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MINE!!!!!!



Spoiler

AMDXIEZS's Avatar


AMDXIEZS
01.22.2012 , 02:53 PM | #673
Chances are theres nothing wrong with your computer, its just the game itself having issues if your every other game works perfectly. Imo as long as this game can maintain AT LEAST 30fps even in populated area then I am all good. What I am concerned with is the stuttering issue...but I guess people don't want to talk about that here, but oh wait everytime it stutters, there was an fps dip, and that dip seemingly caused by I/O choking. So there we have it, its all connected somehow. I don't expect miracles, but like most of you wanted, I want someone from Bioware to provide an update on these issues.

Rikeryo's Avatar


Rikeryo
01.22.2012 , 02:56 PM | #674
something is really wrong with the engine sw:tor is using.
bioware is not willing to answer people when they ask for an explanation (or solution).
maybe this quote from mr. wakantanka can help people understand the problem.
I'll continue to quote him in this thread until an official statement has been made by bioware.

Originally Posted by Wakantanka

Quote:
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.

CursedRevelation's Avatar


CursedRevelation
01.22.2012 , 03:10 PM | #675
Quote: Originally Posted by Rikeryo View Post
something is really wrong with the engine sw:tor is using.
bioware is not willing to answer people when they ask for an explanation (or solution).
maybe this quote from mr. wakantanka can help people understand the problem.
I'll continue to quote him in this thread until an official statement has been made by bioware.

Originally Posted by Wakantanka



your rigs are fine guys, it's bioware.
gl! hope u wont get warned or even banned. FOR THE TRUTH!

Carousel_t's Avatar


Carousel_t
01.22.2012 , 04:09 PM | #676
It's not THE truth what Waka said, it's - as he himself stated - an educated guess. It could be number of things. I do not think it's optimization nor is it engine as a whole - in this case, problems would occur on all rigs, more like lack of support for selected hardware. I've seen SWTOR runing flawlessly on many PCs, mine unfortunately isn't one of them. My guess would be, as guy from the creator team of Hero Engine said himself - engine wasn't ready when BW adopted it to build SWTOR around it, it was broken and unfinished. From BW's behaviour I can venture a guess they fear of mass subscribers loss. That, however, isn't the biggest of their problems. They would lose credibility as a software company which would lead to huge economical problems as investors would withdraw their money leading to massive employees layoffs. I can think of no other reason why they wouldn't address the problem publicly if not for a reason they simply will not solve it, ever. Going further, the problem cannot be solved because THE problem is also THE solution to other problem becoming a chain reaction in which they would have to either build new engine from scratch or re-write existing one (or they already are doing it). Try asking yourself, what is a software developer basing his assumptions on? I mean, what kind of configuration does he have in minda when building a game engine? Well probably rigs that are most expensive at this time, so hopefuly, when he finishes, it will be a standard system which everyone can afford. And to just play along with me on this one, answer me this - which machines are best suited to run the game? SWTOR i mean. Um, seems like 4-5 year old ones have no problems runing the game, isn't that kinda close to the time when Hero engine was developed and sold to BW?

Would you tell the public, you're selling them a broken product?

Want me to guess what's wrong with HE? I'd say, dev team, who made it, thought there won't be a breakthrough in making 40nm architecture. Obvious choice at that day was the bandwidth. Which video cards again had problems runing the game? Oh right, ATI ones - which are known of having 128bit bandwidth, and GeForces green cards like 520 - with 64bit bandwidth.

Even now, with people using PCs at daily basis, there are many of us, simply knowing how to use a machine not trying to understand how it works. Following that logic - both software and hardware developers, use same old tricks to sell you their products "look how much you are getting for just few bucks" when in reality, you are getting old product, stripped from it's main components and wrapped in shiny paper - nvidia tactics. Or a product which isn't fully tested and they want you to test it out so they can name it some other name and make you pay twice as much - ati.

And it all comes down to this, if you chose to read only the bottom line - there is no solution, believe me I've tried it all, and there's a good chance there won't be any. There are, however, workarounds. That's how life works.

But this is also, only a guess.

Jabatheruss's Avatar


Jabatheruss
01.22.2012 , 04:21 PM | #677
I was kind of hoping this thread would be dead and gone by now.

I have not played in several days and will not resub until a confirmed fix is known.

Damned shame. I am not sure if the fact that it is only really impacting certain people is more or less reassuring.

Guess I will just check back until I no longer care to play.
I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don’t have as many people who believe it.

JoeHUK's Avatar


JoeHUK
01.22.2012 , 04:38 PM | #678
This will be my last post, if you cannot post once your free-time is up, mine ends tomorrow sometime, So probably won't do my daily bump!

I'll be keeping up to date, as I really want a fix, as I feel I could really enjoy the game, I won't pay for something that is unplayable in my main area of enjoyment (pvp) I can imagine pve being just the same though judging from what I've seen in this thread.

one last DXDIAG

Spoiler

(5770 1gb)
10-15fps in warzones/very very busy areas, no matter what tweaks I do is no fun bioware.

Derkaderb's Avatar


Derkaderb
01.22.2012 , 04:47 PM | #679
Don't even bother posting your DX-diag. Its just something they tell you to do because they wanna think its your computer who are causing this. Just got an answer (FINALLY) about the flickering that has been going on since after 1.1 patch, and that was to send them a DX-diag and reset my UI and lower my graphics.....
Its frustrating how they tell you stuff they dont even bother looking up on, your DX-diag in this case, and just ignores you.

Gadzooks's Avatar


Gadzooks
01.22.2012 , 04:50 PM | #680
So ive been running all sorts of monitors on my 2nd monitor (yes, i was getting this issue long before i got 2 monitors).

My CPU, regardless of where im at in the game, bounces between 40% and 70% load.

Surprisingly, when my framerate drops, my CPU load is still only usually between 40-50%.

However, watching in realtime, as my Framerate drops in warzones (and fleet), the GPU load also goes down.

Once the framerate settles at a steady 20 FPS in warzones, my GPU load is ZERO. Thats right. 0. Zero. Nill, Nothing.

In other games, when I start to take a hit to my performance, the GPU load goes UP as the gfx card works harder to perform. SWTOR, in Warzones and Fleet, its the EXACT opposite.

Again, another sign that this is software, not hardware related.
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