I think I know what's causing poor FPS for some users (no fix yet)

someone need to go out and buy about 36Gb ram, make a huge RAM drive, copy the lot to it and test

edit:
nvm, read previous post saying it didnt help...

I had considered this. I want to point out in this case I'm refering to TOR's 'page file'. I can see how TOR paging data to the hard drive while Windows is also doing the same thing with its own page file could cause a nasty performance hit. Even an SSD would have a hard time with that much I/O. Generally, disabling Windows' page file is not recommended.

This is one of the points where so many people get frustrated with this game. There is no universal fix. By moving the arena cache to a RAM drive, I saw improvement, not a fix. My FPS didn't go up. What I saw instead was less FPS drops when data is loaded, and quicker recovery when drops did happen. This also stopped the issue where placeholder low res textures would stay on screen for several seconds until the higher res ones had loaded.

This fix won't work for everyone but what I have seen says it offers a general improvement as long as you have enough RAM. If you have 6GB or less it's possible that you may even lose performance using that much space for a RAM drive.

I would also expect to see less of a noticeable difference for users on SSDs. Still using a mechanical drive and having the RAM to spare, I can say without a doubt there is a benefit. But that still doesn't fix this issue. I still believe there are problems with both caching and streaming of data and I still believe some of it has to do with the arena cache file.

We are getting a guide that will fix our low end machines... They said we were getting it today. Is it a sign that I am spending more time on the forums looking for band-aids for my game rather than slide showing around??? Sub is cancled already, and sadly I waited on this game for a long time. If they don't fix this I will personally not buy anymore EA games.

Why did you try to add more RAM? You should know with your assumed expertize that a 32bit executable can never use more than 4gb RAM.

FPS issues are due to the older Dx9 architechture inherent of the HeroEngine which is too CPU dependant. The CPU will not scale as well as newer GPUs under equal load. Hence AI and other players in the same area will cause heavy FPS drops.

It's not 'assumed expertize'. I am aware of memory addressing limitations of 32 bit apps. 6 GB of RAM, take away whatever Windows needs and I need for background apps and it doesn't leave a lot left for an app that wants 4GB. At the time I believed it may have been a paging issue, monitored resource usage and suspected I needed more RAM. I was considering adding more anyway for some of the other apps I work on. Based on similar experiences other users have had and going through the same steps I did, the conclusion was valid so you gained nothing by questioning our ability to troubleshoot a problem.

Don't presume to educate me when you don't have all of the facts. And don't confuse the issue at hand. If you are not going to contribute something useful to the evaluation of these issues, don't post.

This engine is older and optimized for small data sets, BW basically piled large, high res data and calculations into this old engine without expanding the engines performance to handle much larger, modern rendering and calculations. This isn't the first developer I've seen do this with an engine that cant handle what their demanding from it.

End result: trying to force an elephant through a keyhole.

And btw, very nice job OP.

Extremely educational thread, would love to see BW say something on this as being a 32 bit engine is 90% of the problem for most systems as no one has sold a 32 bit computer in 3 years now.
Question: Why would BW use a 32 bit Engine and 7 year old design in todays 64 bit market?

Ease of development and profit margins.

Like many other developers, they're more interested in what sort of "features" they can pile into the game so that its more marketable. Performance really takes a back seat as they're more interested in bottom line $ figures rather than how the game actually performs. They can now say that the game has flashy this or flashy that feature that makes it sell. Its all about what they can list on paper.

Bioware isn't the only offender in this arena, its really all over the place. This is why we see so many bad titles being released these days. Developers are simply not taking the time (or money) to develop or optimize engines to push the amount of data the "flash" requires.

then why do some people not have a fps issue? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eshtNhmP1Cg