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

I dont see why someone has to compare another game to TOR in a thread about how we want better performance in TOR.

My response was to show that I dont CARE if TERA is super smooth. I want to play TOR. I want to play TOR for GAMEPLAY reasons. Performance is making it hard for me to play however. So when someone mentions another game that gets good performance, Im going to mention why I dont care to play it. Dont over analyze it.

Unreal Engine vs ZEROengine... hmmm let's think about it.

it's like klitschko vs stephen hawking

(sorry for that one, I really love mr. hawking, he's an awesome man)

Aranthaur,

I just wanted to say, i love your signature (the sub cancelled part).

Ill support you by not supporting swtor (money wise)

^_^

Hearing alot of people saying that Beta was fine, then it all went pear shaped when it went live,

So, what changed ?

And, where system specs a requirement for a Beta invite, ie did you have to give specs before getting an invite ?

Did anyone play Beta on a low spec PC ?, if you did, how did it run ?

Was the game code optimized for high spec PC's during Beta (Bioware/EA knowing full well that Beta players would then put out a good "vibe" regarding the game), but then "gimped" it to run on the min specs ready for release.

Did something go badly wrong during this "gimping" ?, who knows, its all just questions, without any answers.


One thing I do know for sure, and that is this Game has a real problem with regards to how it pulls Player Data, allowing it to then draw a Player Char.

Just one single Player comming into a field of view that has already been rendered causes a "stutter", a momentary freeze as it pulls the data on a variable char, a player.

NPC is a pre-set, never changes, simply has to be drawn

Player Char is a variable, lots of data has to be pulled then drawn.

Large numbers of player chars turning up in your field of view causing stutters and freezes on a low spec PC, yeah I can understand that, WoW does that all the time, you can witness that everyday in AV.

But just ONE player char turning up in your field of view causing a stutter, a freeze, thats absurd.

Seem to remember Blizz devs talking about this years ago in a developer blog, and they stated that it was one of the hardest things to get right with regards to MMO's, simply because the player char is such a variable, and the more variables you add, the bigger the problem gets.

So, to many Variables ?, who knows, who cares,

I think Bioware just need some time to work out what Blizz already know.

And EA should go back to silly sports games, where rushed releases and unattainable hype really dont matter all that much.

This reminds me of something else as well.

During the early days of WoW, there was an issue where your characters would take a LONG time to show up on the character select screen. They would take long because of it having to load pretty much everything about your character, including gear, stats, inventory, skills, talents etc. The more characters you had, the longer it took.

Of course, Blizzard finally fixed it. Most likely by removing the need to load all that data just to show your character. They probably also allowed for some linking item table that just took the item ID of your gear, linking it to just a table for how that gear looks on your character, rather than actually polling the database for the entire specs on your gear.

I have a feeling that SWTOR is pulling as this type of data for every player that comes into "your zone". Ever try to inspect someone? Notice how there doesnt seem to really be a load time like this is in WoW when you inspect someone? Aside from the normal 1 second "freeze" that you get when your open your bags, the game immediately displays that players stats and gear (with full stats). This means the game has already had your client get this data prior to you requesting it. This to me seems like a wasted task. I could play for days without ever inspecting someones gear. Id rather just have it take 3-5 seconds to load their character data when I do, than to preload it for every character that im around.

This would have a HUGE impact on performance in areas such as the fleet, where there are 100+ players around you at any given time. It would affect warzones as well, but not nearly as much (the main FX file seems to be 99% of the performance problem in warzones.) ilum would be a mix of both of these problems being that its pvp (heavy use of the main FX file), and lots of players (like the fleet).

Bioware needs to really go through and massively reduce the amount of things the game is making the client load and process that arent really needed. IE: optimization.

There has been a big question that has irked me since this all started. If this performance issues happens on low end, mid range, and high end machines, why is it only affecting some of the user base? (regardless of if thats 5%, 10%, or even 30%.).

From a programming stand point, that just doesnt make sense. It would make sense if the only people having the issue were people on low end machines. Or, if the only people having it owned Dell's, or if the only people having it were using nvidia cards, etc etc. But the fact that its happening to such a full range of computer specs, without anything in common with each other to link them to a specific commonality is truly mind boggling.

How can the same game code cause such a different performance on such a broad range of computer specs outside of the common "Low end = slow, mid range = average, high end = super performance" expected results?.

How indeed...

unless... at some points in the patching, downloading, updating, installing, etc of the game files, some users got parts of the code (code version), that differed from other users.

"But people have uninstalled and reinstalled the game and the problem still persists!" Right, so the question is, where did they reinstall the game from? DVD? The games digital downloader? Knowing this would go a long way towards determining if there was an actual source of bad code.

"But people can run the repair tool". Right, but the repair tool only fixes missing files. Not files that might be the wrong "Version", with the exception of maybe the games executable. Also, if the digital download of the game has the bad code, then it would be comparing bad code, to bad code, and deem that no repair was needed. This would also mean that if you had good files from a DVD install, and ran the repair, your game could now be having performance problems.

"But what about when the game patches itself?" Patches only replace the parts of the code that have been changed. If you have game code on your system that is bad, but wasnt something they modified in the patch, a game patch wont touch that part of the code.

I know this may seem like a long shot, but from a programmers experience, this sort of thing can happen when you have 100+ developers (some of which are probably outsourced), and you are all working from the same code base. Throw in improper version tracking or file check out system (or total lack there of.) and you run the chance of getting versions of the code mismatched, and mixed up. Its entirely possible that the code the developers have running on their test machines isnt 100% the same as the code those of us with problems are having.

Now... this theory can easy be put to rest if Bioware simply responded saying "We've recently had our developers install the game from the same download tool and method that any customer would do, and they are still not experiencing these performance issues"

So Bioware... the ball is STILL in your court... This isnt a request asking you to say you fixed something, just to acknowledge that your team is indeed working/playing off the same exact game code that those of us with issues are using. Especially when it comes to you trying to test WHY this is happening to many of us.

I played beta on a low spec pc. It barely met the minimum requirements for the game and it ran surprisingly well. When the game went live however it was pretty much unplayable, and I ended up building a new machine. (Which runs the game great incidentally)

For the second part. I've heard rumors and hearsay that the full texture package wasn't released during beta which is why low end pc's may have been able to run it better, but nothing that can be confirmed in any way I think.

But even that being the case even on minimum settings, many high end machines have met under 15FPS~ Its a curse, not a simple glitch. lol

And Gadzooks~~~~~~ Gadzooks~~~~~~~ I think that is very likely. O,..,O

Did anyone else notice that if you ctrl-alt-del and look at processes you will see TWO swtor's running?

Game is unplayable for me. 1fps, cpu shuts down after 10 min of laggy play.


FIX IT