Re-Optimize This Game

Sir If I buy a Yugo for car, no matter what I do to it, its still a Yugo 1 the worst cars in the world.

If im developers and CEO and I am making 250-300 million dollar mmo over 7 years, and launch 6 monthes to early with beta features like legacy, lfg tool and on on not in yet, that was Promised.

Then im dam sure not going to buy game engine that came out of cracker jack box!

Hmm, interesting. I have had to make concessions on my graphic settings in this game to improve performance (a first), I shall give this a bash, thank you.

I'm running TOR on a one year old Alienware M18X. It ran perfectly well on max settings until about 6/7 weeks ago. Then the horror story began!

I have given up with WZ's altogether as the performance is dismal. The fleet is also absolute hell! The lag/low fps is just appalling. I have turned everything down to very low and still have issues. I began to think it may have been my laptop. So last night I loaded Crysis 2 and F1 2011. I set them both to ultra and prepared for the worst. What I got was far from bad, both played with no noticeable issues. All three fans blew enough hot air to heat a small room lol. But when TOR is running only the left hand fan (GPU 1) runs constantly and occasionally the middle fan (CPU) starts up. There is no heat/activity coming from the right side fan (GPU2) at all. I'm a little worried that if this continues I may damage my system. I saved for two years to buy it and I really cant afford to replace it if it grenades itself! It is set to maximum performance and crossfire is enabled. I have reinstalled the OS and tried various Dell/Alienware and AMD graphics drivers. I flashed the BIOS to the newest version and have disabled all but essential background tasks.

So back to head scratching for me! Anybody have an M18X with the following spec who may be able to advise on a course of action for me?

i7 2960XM 2.7Ghz
2x AMD 6990's in crossfire
2x 256Gb SSD's in Raid '0'
8Gb 1600Mhz Ram

This game has long ceased to be a hobby and has now become an addiction. I really can't imagine what I would do if I couldn't get my daily fix of this!

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.

Not sure if it helps anyone, but I've gained about 20 fps by migrating to windows 8. Now runs with anti-aliasing and shadows enabled as well as it did before without those things. Even better, in most situations.

The real question is though, is it truly Windows 8 giving the performance boost, or is it the mere fact of it being a fresh installation? Chances are high if you reinstalled windows 7 (assuming that's what you used) you may have noticed a similar performance boost.

Computers tend to gather a lot of junk overtime as people install new things, but hardly ever bother to remove the old. Windows partitions logging itself full also doesn't help, some people fail to realize that if the windows partition has only 1 GB or less left, windows often doesn't become too happy as it's a default pagefile drive as well.

Last but not least, the migration to windows 8 was without a hardware upgrade I take it?

Okay, time to eat humble pie. I'm posting this to a) hi-light my stupidity and b) to help others who may have encountered a drop in performance.

I have religiously cleaned and hoovered my vents ever since owning my machine thinking it was the right thing to do. From outside there appeared to be no dust/fluff etc. anywhere. Last week I decided to remove the bottom cover and the three fans as I was getting concerned about this much to the point I was losing sleep! It cost a fortune to buy and I expect to keep this for at least another 2/3 years.

The bottom cover came off and there was no visible issues. Then I removed the fans...... OMG!!! All the hoovering I had been doing over the last year had done nothing to clear the radiators, it had in fact dragged every bit of dust and fluff and compacted it up against the heat-sink radiator into three solid blocks of crap! They were so compacted they more or less came out in three separate pieces! I was gob smacked by what I had seen. I also gave it a blast of compressed air while it was all open for good measure. I re-assembled everything and re-started TOR. Hey presto! It now runs again on very high settings with no stutter, no drop in fps and it's now back to being the laptop it was when new I still can't get my head around Crysis 2 and F1 2011 running on ultra with no problem and TOR struggling like hell to play on very low. Looks like that will have to remain one of life's mysteries!