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

Its entireley possible mate.


I get 70+ on my desktop machine in warzones and a respectable 30+ when a 40 man war waging on Ilum, its a i5 2500k 8gb ram and GTX 480 SOC however due to its location I cant use it at night when kids are in bed so I play on my laptop i7 740QM 460 GTX 8GB Ram and the laptop is a pain in the backside.

45-80 FPS everywhere including huttball and voidstar. i step foot on Ilum or ald warzone and chugga chugga choo choo down to 7 FPS if I am lucky.

The PVE is pants as is all PVE so warzones are the only thing keeping me going and only being able to play 66% of my time without issues is becoming tedious to the point I've been hovering on that unsub button.

After asking around on some forums I found out that you pretty much need to manually install these drivers out of the package.

So what I did was run the chipset driver installer and let it extract the files to C:\AMD\Support, once extracted I went through and manually installed the SMBus driver that is found in the packages folder. It went from a 2006 MS driver to a 2010 AMD driver. Instead of being called the ATI I/O Communications Processor SMBus Controller, It is now called the AMD SMBus.

I'd like to throw in that everyone using any kind of SATA should make sure they're running in AHCI mode and not IDE mode in their BIOS.

When my motherboard died last week, I did a reinstall of Windows after getting my refurb just because it had been such a long time since doing so.

By default my CMOS settings have all of my SATA channels set to IDE mode. Unknowingly I installed Windows7 in IDE mode and didn't figure out what was going wrong until recently.

Switching to AHCI from IDE on an install of Windows will cause BSOD's unless you first apply the registry changes listed in this microsoft article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Doing this brought me up from a 5.9 score in WEI to a 6.7 in the Disk speed category.

After investigating anything else that I could improve on, I discovered that a lot of my chipset devices were still on Windows default drivers. I'm using an AMD chipset (790GX) and I had downloaded the most recent 12.2 Chipset drivers from AMD, and all it installed was the USB Filter driver and AHCI drivers.

After asking around on some forums I found out that you pretty much need to manually install these drivers out of the package.

So what I did was run the chipset driver installer and let it extract the files to C:\AMD\Support, once extracted I went through and manually installed the SMBus driver that is found in the packages folder. It went from a 2006 MS driver to a 2010 AMD driver. Instead of being called the ATI I/O Communications Processor SMBus Controller, It is now called the AMD SMBus.

I found out on a hardware forum that I still needed my AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Driver installed. The problem was that the 12.2 set doesn't contain this driver. In fact it hasn't been in a chipset release for a few revisions. It is also a driver from 2010 as it isn't a driver that AMD has to update a lot. So I downloaded each older chipset driver set until I finally found it in the 11.8 set. It identifies it as a Northbridge Filter Driver.

I was able to run the 11.8 setup and choose custom install and install only the Northbridge Filter driver without an issue.

I now have an AMD PCI Express (3GIO) Filter Driver showing up in my device manager.

My game is now running a ton smoother, I'm not reporting perfect Illum/WZ performance or anything, but players/objects etc all load a little faster without that 1-3 second pause I was sometimes getting.

I still have choppy framerates in heavy load situations, and the way the SWTOR HeroEngine loads assets still puts unnecessary strain on my systems I/O. It's just that now my system is handling it much better than it was before.

I hope this helps anyone who is using an AMD/ATi chipset.

It's nice to see bioware still ignoring this thread, really makes me feel like giving them money, oh wait