Very High Graphics Setting: Who is this for, NASA computers?

11-26-2012.

Find something newer. Mine's updated weekly.

Same here, my rig is pushing five years, I have really looked after her and upgraded only the gfx card. I spent around a grand on her. I can run SWTOR on Very High settings, only areas that drop to low fps are highly populated zones like the GTN at times, and our guilds larger scale RP-PVP battles.

I ran the Unigine Heaven 4 benchmark , standard out of the box settings @ 1900x1080, SLI enabled; and got a score of 2458. Max FPS 208.6, average FPS 97.6. I'm pretty sure it's not my video cards that are causing the low frame rate on the fleet/pvp.

And I see a lot of people saying "I run fine every except high population areas." This is what I'm talking about. If I'm off doing missions by myself, or spending quality time on my starship by myself everything looks fantastic. I'm mainly talking about pvp/fleet where there ARE a lot of people.

TIL: I own a NASA computer.

One thing that I experienced is that aside from messing with AA and bloom the game became smoother and smoother as I turned the graphics up on both my old laptop and this one. Just needed something to get me by as classes are about to start, will eventually get a full rig, but it has been more than strange to me that higher settings have yielded better results. Aside from some adds taking longer than they should to populate at times it's relatively smooth on higher settings minus the new Czerka area which seems to murder almost everyone.

It really is a shame though that as much money has been pumped into this game they haven't taken the time to make a rebuild a priority. I understand the time and cost involved but you build a smooth, beautiful looking environment with great content and you will keep your customers for years to come. You have us for the long-haul if you do it right BioWare, so why not step up?

Eve, Wow, Starcraft, Guildwars, and other PC-based online gaming have yet to pull me in but here I am spending my cash to play your game, so why not give me and everyone else the best that you can?

No amount of hardware at your end will cure this. Lag on the Fleet, PvP and other crowded areas (eg CZ-198) is largely a server side issue. You can lessen the problem with good hardware and a good ping, but you'll never cure it.

This phenomenon isn't exclusive to SWTOR, all MMOs suffer lag when lots of players end up in the same location or zone. Some game engines handle it better than others (I'd put SWTOR somewhere in the middle) but all suffer it to some degree.

There's some next gen MMOs in the pipeline that are making claims to have developed ways to counteract this type of lag, but such claims have been made before and it's a case of believe it when we see it.

Funny, if you read my entire post I was specifically talking about when the cards came out.

I run 680 GTX in SLI and know your issue all too well.

Go into settings > Nameplates> and disable "Scale Nameplates With Distance"

Unfortunately SLI seems to have massive problems with scaling nameplates and no one has been able to figure out why. However, the odd thing about this problem is that if I run the game in SLI across 3 monitors in surround mode it has no issue with scaling nameplates and runs extremely smooth while properly utilizing both cards (as much as the game allows that is)

If I run the game in SLI across 3 monitors with each monitor serving as a separate one (done for streaming) then it seems to have massive issues with scaling nameplates.

Give it a try and see if that helps. It takes a while to get used to the stupid massive nameplates but it runs significantly smoother.

It is an aside, but how does Eve do? I saw shots recently from that ridiculously massive, multi-hour battle and just have to wonder how that turned out.

Wow - I gave this a try. There are a lot of folks at the PvP terminal on the fleet, and FPS seems pretty stable at 45 to 55. No hiccups when turning. Although these nameplates look terrible now... thanks for the tip.

edit: less people now (around 14)... pretty much pegged at 60fps. This seems to have done the trick.

IT'S THE NAMEPLATES! Perhaps this is what they were talking about when they said chat bubbles were affecting system performance in beta.