Re-Optimize This Game

The bottlenecks are massive performance drops in high population areas, which have no explanation, other than a server issue or poor coding.

The bottlenecks are massive performance drops in high population areas, which have no explanation, other than a server issue or poor coding.

This game and TF2 are the only games where lots of players = strange performance issues. Both are notorious for being poorly written.

QFT. After 1.4, my performance on both my desktop and my laptop (which runs lowest settings for heat/battery issues) decreased. The fact that after a patch the machine with the lowest possible settings decreased in performance tells me that they messed something up. Note, that 1.4 is the 1st patch after they fired most of their developers and other staff. It's when the game really began going down the toilet.

Does anyone know if they plan on re-optimizing this game before or after the expansion release? Ever since the stutter issue with the game that they "fixed" I've still be having issues planing they game even on lower settings. I was wondering if anyone else was still having issues. And yes I am running a high end machine with everything updated to the latest drivers.

It's not a big deal but I remember being able to play the game without any issues what so ever.

Server isn't the thing, the issue lies client side. With TF2 I take it you mean Team Fortress 2?

What people quickly forget with games which have a cartoonified look, is that that definitely doesn't mean the models are of low quality. For example with TF2, the average model is roughly 8k polygons in high detail on close distance. That excludes any items, so including items, it'll come up to roughly 12k polygons.

For SWTOR, I'd expect those figures to lie at around 4k for the character models (as for reference, Worgen poly counts in Cata were around 3k naked), with about an additional 4k in armor design on high quality.

If you then have 30 people in close proximity, you need to be able to render 240k polygons on characters alone per frame. If you want to run with 60 fps, that means per second you need to be able to render 14.4 million polygons per second. If you double it to 60 people, make that 28.8 million polygons per second.

Now of course if you have a recent gen card which can render hundreds of millions of polygons per second, that ought to be no issue. However, that requires the game to directly tell the GPU to rener those polygons.

DirectX 9 does NOT do that. DirectX 9 first tells the CPU, let's the CPU calculate the planes which need to be rendered and that then lets the GPU render those planes. And therein lies a major issue. As these polygon per second counts are just character models, not even environments to be added to it.

CPU's have never been optimized for this task. That's the entire reason we have GPU's doing it for us instead. Sure, a CPU is capable of doing it in the end. But it's like trying to write a manuscript on your Ti 83+ calculator. Due to this, polygon counts still form the limitation of fps in such older games, in contrast to complex shading tasks, lightning, effects, physics, etc.

This will ultimately only be able to be truly resolved by upgrading the client to support DirectX 11 efficiently, which would allow for the game client to directly interact with the GPU when it comes to telling it to render.



In 1.3 and 1.4 they threw in some additional graphics options. With 1.3 they added the new high res character models. In 1.4 they added improved shading and optimized the shading code a bit. However, with 1.4 they also reset the graphical settings.

So if you simply went for max again there, you started off with higher res character models than you did before if you didn't set those manually, and you started off with a higher level of shading. Two things which are expected to give a performance hit.

Server isn't the thing, the issue lies client side. With TF2 I take it you mean Team Fortress 2?

What people quickly forget with games which have a cartoonified look, is that that definitely doesn't mean the models are of low quality. For example with TF2, the average model is roughly 8k polygons in high detail on close distance. That excludes any items, so including items, it'll come up to roughly 12k polygons.

For SWTOR, I'd expect those figures to lie at around 4k for the character models (as for reference, Worgen poly counts in Cata were around 3k naked), with about an additional 4k in armor design on high quality.

If you then have 30 people in close proximity, you need to be able to render 240k polygons on characters alone per frame. If you want to run with 60 fps, that means per second you need to be able to render 14.4 million polygons per second. If you double it to 60 people, make that 28.8 million polygons per second.

Now of course if you have a recent gen card which can render hundreds of millions of polygons per second, that ought to be no issue. However, that requires the game to directly tell the GPU to rener those polygons.

DirectX 9 does NOT do that. DirectX 9 first tells the CPU, let's the CPU calculate the planes which need to be rendered and that then lets the GPU render those planes. And therein lies a major issue. As these polygon per second counts are just character models, not even environments to be added to it.

CPU's have never been optimized for this task. That's the entire reason we have GPU's doing it for us instead. Sure, a CPU is capable of doing it in the end. But it's like trying to write a manuscript on your Ti 83+ calculator. Due to this, polygon counts still form the limitation of fps in such older games, in contrast to complex shading tasks, lightning, effects, physics, etc.

This will ultimately only be able to be truly resolved by upgrading the client to support DirectX 11 efficiently, which would allow for the game client to directly interact with the GPU when it comes to telling it to render.



In 1.3 and 1.4 they threw in some additional graphics options. With 1.3 they added the new high res character models. In 1.4 they added improved shading and optimized the shading code a bit. However, with 1.4 they also reset the graphical settings.

So if you simply went for max again there, you started off with higher res character models than you did before if you didn't set those manually, and you started off with a higher level of shading. Two things which are expected to give a performance hit.

The bottlenecks are massive performance drops in high population areas, which have no explanation, other than a server issue or poor coding.

This game and TF2 are the only games where lots of players = strange performance issues. Both are notorious for being poorly written.

What your saying makes the most sense to me, being a student currently studying game development I have been recently studying DX9 and DX11, This would certainly improve things for performance its just depends on if Bio ware can change to DX11 however I wouldn't expect that for a while. For Now they should keep up with the quality of life improvements which actually do make a difference in the long run even if people don't notice it.

The explanation is also poor PC configuration. My PC is mid range (£600) and still maintains 60FPS+ on fleet with the number of people drawn maxed (110FPS is the norm elsewhere). The only thing that does affect FPS on my PC is shadows.

I was able to run on full high settings before a patch, don't remember which one, but after said patch, I was having massive lag spikes at random times (especially, of course, in high-population zones).

I figured out a solution though, don't know if it will work for everyone, but I turned off scaling nameplates. Now, I'm back to full speed, high settings and super happy!

Settings > Preferences > Name Plates > uncheck Scale Nameplates with Distance > Save/Apply

I wouldn't expect it either, converting from DX9 to DX11 is a massive undertaking, even for a relatively small project. Let stand for a major project such as this.