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

do I just copy/paste the fx file into my ram drive?

can someone post a guide how to use this ramdriver software?

edit: nvm found it

I have 4gb of RAM and I was wondering is it worth creating a small RAM drive for the sole purpose of running the effects file?

I removed the file and found a staggering performance gain. Is it worth doing this, or even practical?

You need to make a link to the RAM drive for the fx file. Check the ops post on the first page. The What Helps section of his post. Hopefully that will get you going.

Here is what I did. I did everything in this post: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=154568

Then I did everything the Op said to do in this thread. I suggest doing everything in the RAM drive thread. That will get you familiar with what you need to do. Then go back and read the first post of this thread and do what Cupelixx says in the What Helps section of his post.

Hope that helps guys.

I did, it said make a back up, remove/delete that file from the folder and then run that line in cmd, which I did and it didn't put it into my ram drive so I copy pasted it in.

Right on, yeah that should work fine. As long as you pasted the fx file where the link is looking for it then you should be good.

Great thread, lot of info and I hope I can contribute also: "Light sabers, lightnings and maybe other combat effects" are NOT altered with TextureQuality and MeshLODQuality (shader) or recent new bucket parameters in settings.ini: that means they are always rendered at full quality independently of what you set in game. I have taken screenshots where every characters and buildings' textures are in flat shades excepts sabers and lightnings effects.
Additionnaly, since the 1.1 patch and in response of the High resolution complaint thread (here:http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1478869) your character and your pet is not affected by TextureQuality anymore: they are always rendered in best quality from now.

That seems to be design errors that could be double checked. This would also match with the fact that putting the "swtor_main_art_fx_1" asset into ramdrive smoother the game. But trust me, I have already tried to put numerous assets files into the Ramdrive and I cannot find yet a solution to get higher than 15fps in 30v30 Ilum battle yet. No issue in warzones though.

/still searching

What are you talking about? EVERYONE has it; watch when other people run in/out of that area in that guy's video...huge delays/choppiness...not sure why you think he's not getting a horrible frame rate.

HDD Throughput Correlated to Bad FPS

I can verify that I've also seen issues with hdd I/O speed being strongly correlated with slow-down. I haven't tested this yet, but running the windows resource monitor while playing TOR shows a correlation with my fps tanking and my hdd I/O spiking, so I agree with OP that the renderer is probably hanging when your HDD can't pull from the assets file fast enough.

Unfortunately correlation doesn't imply relation. Need to do more reading on the hero engine to make this determination.

Two things I'd like to add ...

1. I'm running a WD Caviar 7200 RPM 1TB and it's all nice and partitioned. The I/O throughput for the sequential r/w's is plenty, but like most mechanical drives, the random r/w is atrocious. In my case, I get less than 800k/s throughput on a 4k random r/w (benchmark). Based on what I see in the resource monitor, when my disk I/O is running less than 1MB, my fps is great (50+). However, when it spikes, my fps tanks.

An SSD should fix the I/O issues. I'm getting one since I've been meaning to anyway, so when that happens, I can report on if that actually fixes anything. Unfortunately the fact that people with SSDs are also reporting low framerates is somewhat disheartening, but that also leads me to my second point.

2. I've seen plenty of specs with PSU wattage stats, but almost none about individual rails (which are actually going to drive the devices). I mention this since when I bought by 650W PSU back a few years ago, I thought I had gotten a single +12V rail rated for 41A. Turns out I was wrong and I actually got a +5V rail @ 41A and my +12V was only at 27A.

Now I run a HD6850. Benchmarks show my card to run 230W at full load. So on my +12V rail my card is eating up almost 20A leaving me with 7A for everything else. My CPU (Athlon II X4 620) runs at 125W max load so if that's all on the +12V rail, then that's another 10A. Assuming the devices are exclusively using the +12V rail, there may be power issues here.

So you say well people with awesome PSUs (ex. dual +12V rails, 800W) are still having issues. Now this is all guess work here but from what I understand, connector arrangement on the PSU determines the rail they draw power from. So even on dual +12V rails at say 17A and 15A, it may be possible that one rail is powering ONLY the cpu and the other rail is powering everything else. If my card needs 20A of juice on a +12V rail, neither of those rails will be sufficient.

I'm not sure how this works with rail virtualization, modular cables, and all that, but perhaps?

Theoretics

So here's a refined theory: assuming your CPU/GPU/RAM stats are all kosher, fps bottlenecking is then a result of disk / power level. So A) OPs post offers a solution to improving hdd I/O speed and latency. I would further add that if random r/w on the main TOR assets is causing issues, defragging may possibly help by getting the assets lined up for a more sequential r/w read. Going SSD may also solve this problem. B) If hdd throughput is not the issue, then perhaps there's a power issue. Doing some simple math against GPU, CPU, and PSU rails will give a better answer.

Proof-of-Concept

I've been meaning to buy a new SSD and PSU in prep for my next system, so now seems like a good time to do that. I'll post back once they come in and I can do some more testing.

Other Unlikely Thoughts

1. Based on resource monitor, CPU usage seems to be pretty stable at about 60% while I'm playing TOR. Further I don't see a correlation (even with time-delay) between the infrequent CPU spikes and FPS drops. I'm not sure how TOR does threading, but it may be possible that it's saturating one core (I have a quad core) and the remaining cores are mostly idle. I plan to test this if I have the patience and actually remember to do it.

2. Network data is synchronous. I doubt this, but it may be a possibility. If network data is synchronous with the renderer, then the engine waits for all network data to be recieved before drawing the frame. In this scenario, your internet connection isn't really the issue, but how fast the server is sending you player information. This might explain fps issues in high pop areas. I'm not putting a lot of stock in this since it doesn't seem to fit well when you consider just how low fps can drop and I also don't see band traffic increase significantly in high pop areas or drop significantly in low pop areas. I don't have the patience to set up a wireshark test for this, but maybe someone else with time can take a look.

Again not a lot of stock in either of these.

TL; DR

FPS issues may be cause by hdd I/O throughput and/or PSU issues. So does anyone have fps issues running TOR assets off an SSD and sufficient amps on their PSU rails? And post your damn stats. Maybe we can narrow things down here and not have to wait till the second coming to figure out whats wrong :\

Todays patch have changed several assets including the fx one, back to testings