I solved my SWTOR low-FPS problem

Here is how...

While playing, I noticed that TOR was using an awful lot of CPU..in fact 58-74% of all 4 of my CPU cores. That caught my attention as no single app, game, whatever, should use that kind of CPU, and certainly NOT on a high performance system with plenty of RAM, high speed HDDs, and high speed multi-Core CPU.

As it turns out the solution had NOTHING to do with tweaking game settings or my GPU's setting eithers.

It had EVERYTHING to do with altering my PC's POWER MANAGEMENT settings.

See, Win 7/WS2008 defaults to a power management plan it calls 'Balanced', which tries to keep the CPU from switching up to higher frequencies to save power, supposedly only switching up when the app wants more CPU.

Well in my case, instead of the CPU frequency dynamically going up and down like it should, it stayed CAPPED on the LOWEST frequency. Thus the strangely high CPU usage, I was only getting the MINIMUM my quad-core CPU could offer.

SO..w/o changing any game settings or GPU settings at all, I switched the Windows power plan to "High Performance" and BAM..I leapt from a solid 14-22 FPS to a solid 50-60 FPS.

Anyway..the technical story is it seems SWTOR.exe actually is a multi-threaded app (38 at current count) so it can actually spread its load over all CPU cores. That silly power plan had my CPU P-state running at the minimum all the time, never dynamically adjusting like it should, and TOR simply spread the load across the CPU cores and made do.

The CPU is an AMD Athlon II X4 630, and I have an Radeon 5770 PCI-E card w/ 1 GB RAM, and 6 GB of DDR3 RAM, and a pair of SATA II 1TB HDDs for reference.

Anyway..pay heed to those default power plan setting, especially if you run the game on laptops, but check anyway as manufacturers mess with them extensively these days and load up their own power management apps that can kill your performance.

Were you monitoring CPU temps before and after the power adjustment? It would be interesting to see how much of a difference there is, given all the threads about GPU overheating.

wow it worked for me. This mode shouldnt make my computer overheat, just use more energy (aka higher energy bill) right?

I wasn't but I will now..though my GPU fan is running non-stop which is not something I am not used to hearing.

My GPU currently is running at 101c with the fan speed at 93% (though the GPU is not even close to its highest GPU clock or memory clock settings)

GPU is certainly being worked..its always at 90+ % with TOR going and it still uses about 50% CPU across all 4 cores.

Also noticed there are actually TWO swtor.exe processes running, one using about 26% of the CPU, the other about 17%

Yeah my processor always seems to run hot regardless of game so I'd be quite afraid of doing this. Maybe if I got a new heat sink+fan.

Well it SHOULDN'T make your PC overheat, but no promises as it is using more power, and more power does = more heat. IF you have good cooling, not an issue.

But it can be an issue for laptops

You think this would improve fps on a desktop pc too? I don't have fps problems at all but having a few extra never hurts.

as i am using a new desktop, i am not really worried. My computer may not be quite up to par for the requirements for this game, but it runs fine on minimum graphics with shadows turned off.

hm.. so your saying, when you changed the power settings, the temperature rose? And fan was working harder?

Some more details:

Shadow Quality is the real boat anchor now on my FPS. With every other setting to HIGH (inc the Anti-aliasing set to HIGH) and the shadows turned on, I can even get into the 70-80 FPS range (depending on location)

If I turn BLOOM on, i go down to the 45-50 FPS range , but more than playable.

Also have the grass and tree quality to max now.