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

I clean my case/fans etc out regularly to stop dust build up.. I've removed and reseated my graphics card. It does nothing.

Not to mention that dust, and your card not being seated properly, etc etc, are thing that would affect ALL your modern games, not just SWToR.

Most people here get perfectly fine performance in most to all of the more modern, new games on the market. While each has different demands and technical aspects that might affect your computer differently, there should be SOME consistency between performance. Thats how it is in gaming. But when a system can smoothly play these games without issues:

Arkham City
Rage
Skyrim
Battlefield 3
Rift
ME3
MW3
etc

but struggles to get more than 15 fps in PARTS of SWTOR, then that says its the game, not the system. Especially knowing that SWTOR is by all factual means, lower and older tech than most of the games listed above.

Not to quote an old childrens TV show, but "one of these things is not like the other"... and that thing is clearly SWTOR.

I'm running Diablo 3 and I get steady 60 fps without a problem (I get the crowded areas problem on swtor), the game runs flawless, I can alt tab and tab back in in 5 seconds (on swtor if I'm at tatooine I take at least two minutes to load back to the game) why can't you optimize your game like Blizzard does? Honestly, what a good damn job with Diablo's optimization tbh and mostly bug free.

I'm just saying, there might be a plethora of issues, and this worked for one person. I don't care if it doesn't work for you, it might work for me or others. I know I have FPS issues, and you might too! But I don't get on the forums to see people lambasting Bioware (even if they deserve it!). I come here in the hope of finding a fix, because my issue hurts a game I otherwise love. Having to cycle through a 10 to 1 ratio of hate spam vs. helpful material gets old.

We know there are issues. So I'm gonna clean and reseat my GPU and post my results, as it might help someone. I really wish you'd do the same.

Ok I posted this in the "Horrid FPS" thread, but I thought I should post it here in case somebody missed it in the other thread.
As you can see my CPU and GPU are not under heavy load at all when my FPS drop. (I know its a known problem, just more evidence)


(WARNING: The pics are very big because my desktop was extended!)

http://img12.imageshack.us/img12/673/swtorfail.png

http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/3074/swtorfail2.png

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/4435/swtorfail3.png

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/2111/swtorfail4.png

http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/5233/swtorfail5.png

http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/8784/swtorfail6.png

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/7294/swtorfail7.png

http://img442.imageshack.us/img442/4360/swtorfail8.png


Some pics have good FPS, but then drop harshly to 18-30 FPS.

I'm on a Macbook Pro running bootcamp. Although a laptop, and although bootcamping, I have never had any issues with any other games (WoW, Aion, Skyrim). Everything else runs fine, even at full graphics, especially WoW. And this was even while doing multiple things such as running a chat client, listening to music, and browsing the web.

When TOR was released, the lag was horrible. As if the 1-2 minute loading screens weren't enough, the game is still choppy even on the lowest of graphics. I had taken a break since the initial 30 days of gametime with purchase, and just came back a few days ago. I've seen a few improvements, but not enough to keep me bootcamping to get really into the game or keep a sustained membership.

Fixed my FPS issues.

I was in the same boat as many of you for a long time and I finally (for the second time) redid my computer from the ground up, unseated everything, cleaned (thoroughly), and individually set my computer back up, cleanly erased the drives and reinstalled everything, including windows (saved on a back up drive what I wanted to keep). I can't say this will fix your issues, I was able to run every game perfectly fine other than SWTOR before, and now I run everything equally fine, but the change is that SWTOR is running smooth as a babies but went from averaging 5-10 FPS in warzones to having ~70 FPS in warzones.

I am not saying this is a fix, or if I just happened to get lucky for some unknown reason on a reinstall but if you have the time and the ability and want to give it a shot I felt I owed it to all you guys to post what worked for me. (this being the second time I reinstalled everything and first time did nothing to fix the issues)

Why did BioWare use the Hero Engine when the Mass Effect games already showed that the Unreal Engine was good enough? I know TOR has been in the works for a long time, but they could've changed out the engine early in development when they saw how good the Unreal Engine worked in ME1's early builds. ME1 is already why TOR went for full voice acting, based on how much they liked it in an early build of ME1.

Hasn't the Unreal Engine already been used for an MMO or two out there? I imagine TOR could've ran on it, and not had half the problems it already has. I know it's too late to change the engine for the game, but I can wish they would while I wait god knows how long for BioWare to hand fix every engine problem that has created fps lag(for most) and complete computer freezes(for myself and others).

Kage, I hope the cleaning and reseating works for you. I did my best to detail the specific problems, what we tried and what finally worked, including the caveat that it didn't make much sense to me, but it finally resolved my healer's issues after a few weeks of frustrations, which made all of us happy. I'm not as tech-savvy as many of you here, but even though this worked, in the end, I don't believe it was a hardware problem. I believe swapping out to another identical graphics card somehow "reset" something software-related. If that is the case, maybe try uninstalling the driver completely, going to the standard VGA setting, then reinstalling the Geforce drivers.

If this works, I hope you and others can post here so that it may help others still experiencing this issue.


Dzacarias, I had my guildmate email me a stream of screen caps that showed her resource meter over the course of a few days whenever her framerates dropped. She sometimes had the Main_FX animation file loading, other time, certain worlds would show activity (Belsavis), even though she was in Eternity Vault with us and like you, sometimes, it seemed like nothing was being accessed when her frames would mysteriously drop.

Again, for those that did not read my post that outlined what worked for my guildie, her issues were mainly during mission conversations and anytime she walked into the encounter with Soa or Bonecrusher. Framerates during all of these would drop to 1-5 for 5-7 minutes or more.


Volatile, I'm happy to hear you got your issues fixed, although it was quite a drastic step to take. Even so, that was the next step I would have given my guildmate. It's unfortunate that we are resorting to shotgun tactics to try and get this fixed, but the intent with sharing the experience that my guildmate and I had would lead others to get theirs working right.

Guys. You are barking up the wrong tree. Its not the fault of any ones PCs. These problems are causing/created by lazy coding. Its that clear cut.

When on Ilum, the game struggles when control points change hand and when you score kills/valour during the battles. It just cant deal with it all.

Rift is built on the same game engine and I have never experienced any of these kind of problems in a game in my life.