please bioware. please. ive even gone down to "very low", and it has only increased FPS by about 10-15%

 

this would be a great post for one of our new talkative dev friends to chime in.

 

why is it that i can run games like BF3, Far Cry 3, Skyrim, etc on maximum settings with ease, yet SWTOR struggles to put out a constant 60 FPS even on "Very Low"?

 

its really getting annoying

I would be interested to know what the issues are that make SWTOR seem to have more trouble with framerate than other games. It's what stymied large-scale PvP.

bump, would like at least a witty dev response as to why askgsdf is getting more dev attention than ksdfkjsd

theyll optimize it in 2015 their focused on legacy and clothes for droids you know critical issues that keep the game alive and people subbed

^

More pressing matters at hand cash

 

The ship droid can look like a butler now!

Hurray!

Turn off shadows, Bloom and AA. That helps a lot. Game doesn't even look any different when you do that. It's more of a PVP issue though obviously, it just can't handle any number of people on the screen at once, and turrets firing.

I am not an expert but I am told much of the issue here is the Hero Engine does not support large group settings well. Guess they should have known that before the y purchased it or designed their own (more time/money) like WOW did.

And what a crappy graphics, i swear SWG looked better.

Turn off shadows, Bloom and AA. That helps a lot. Game doesn't even look any different when you do that. It's more of a PVP issue though obviously, it just can't handle any number of people on the screen at once, and turrets firing.

 

did you read the OP?

 

i did exactly that. the "very low" graphics setting turns everything off, and it barely increases FPS by 15% when you are in combat.

bump

 

devs should make optimization a priority

I have to agree 100% with the OP here. If I play on my main rig I can manage 30+ FPS in WZ's.....on my secondary rig I can barely crack 20 FPS, often in the mid to low teens.

 

My old rig ran "pretty much" anything else maxed. My newer rig is sporting the i5 3570k, 8 GB ram, Extreme series mobo, GTX570..... and is a road grader in all other games I play, even MMO's with A LOT more than 16 people on the map.....but not this game. What gives? I can play planetside2 with 0 problems. There are literally anywhere from hundreds.....to thousands of people on those maps. What's SWTOR's issue/s?

Performance for me seems to be better then launch. However that may be due to population dropping. Right now i get 80-100fps constantly.

 

I feel for people struggling with their frame rate. When i was on holidays I tried to use my laptop and it ran sooo bad. Real rage inducer.

I also find amazing how I can run games that have better graphics in maxxed out settings with about 60-70fps and yet I have to play swtor like OP does. It would be nice to have some communication about this , if not a brief explanation of the issue , just a post of what bioware plans to do about it. If the devs really read these posts please make not for us.

 

It's bittersweet well actually it borders on the infuriating, to see a dev post on thread asking a cosmetic feature. Yet all threads reguarding how broken pvp is (which pretty much the entire community agrees) or threads like these that address issues that really matter get the silent treatment.

 

I know the devs claim to read the forums and look for feedback. But when you spend that much time refusing to address the issues pointed out by the great majority of the community AND you take so much time to do something about it. We can only assume that either you don't really care about what we say or that bioware rather keep face instead of admit that there is something wrong with the game.

 

IMO this game is not ready for an expansion. It is taking focus away from fixing and testing things that really need to improve in the game. Fix what is broken, don't cover it up with more broken content.

And what a crappy graphics, i swear SWG looked better.

 

Nah i run SWTOR on max settings, and it looks pretty good, IMO.

 

But SWG sure does blow swtor out of the water as far as gameplay, pvp, content and fun goes!

Nah i run SWTOR on max settings, and it looks pretty good, IMO.

 

But SWG sure does blow swtor out of the water as far as gameplay, pvp, content and fun goes!

 

This, all of this.

 

I have only minor lag issues with my year old rig, single video card (GT560, I think), I run all max settings save for shadow quality. I don't track framerates I just use the playability test as my guide.

.

Edited February 20, 2013 by islander

Performance for me seems to be better then launch. However that may be due to population dropping. Right now i get 80-100fps constantly.

 

I feel for people struggling with their frame rate. When i was on holidays I tried to use my laptop and it ran sooo bad. Real rage inducer.

 

performance is definitely *not* better than it was at launch.

 

at launch, this game lacked graphical polish severely. no AA, no bloom, nada. basically, the "very low" setting we have now. and it ran smooth as a knife through hot butter. it was even possible to force AA with some tweaks, and the game looked decent *and* ran well. now when i run on "very low" i can barely pull 50 FPS in combat.

 

now we have all of these random graphical "optimizations" over the last year. and after every single one, almost like clockwork, performance has dipped. 1.3 saw the introduction of random huge lag spikes in WZs. 1.4 brought us a lovely little thing called rubberbanding, as well as "optimized, smoother shadows" which actually make the game run like crap.

 

this is something the devs really need to address. and it needs to be with more than a "yeah we see this and are looking into it" post like every other post they make.

I'd like to explain to you guys why this is happening. It's quite simple: the Hero Engine is horribly, horribly, optimized. It's not a matter of having a better graphics card or a better CPU. It's not a matter of turning your settings down low. You guys should have noticed that on GPU-Z, your video card load rarely exceeds 50%. The fact is, you could have a $10,000 computer, and still see horrible FPS drops. The engine isn't coded well and cannot handle multiple people performing multiple activities. Every time a player performs a movement or ability or skill, the server has to transmit this data back to YOUR client-side to recreate it. Now imagine 16 or 50 or 75 people all simultaneously doing this every second. This is what's causing the frame rate drops.

 

Try this simple test to illustrate my point. Go to the PVP area on the fleet which is usually very busy. Now stand by one of the PVP gear vendors, go into a corner, and zoom in on the wall, so that there is nothing on your screen. Now check your FPS. Notice how it's tanking? Why is it that the FPS is fluctuating when there's nothing moving on your screen and all you're seeing is an ugly texture? Because of the engine. Bioware knows this, but a this point, only small optimizations can be done to the Hero Engine. It's costly and frankly speaking there are other priorities in this game for the devs.

Edited February 20, 2013 by revcrisis

I'd like to explain to you guys why this is happening. It's quite simple: the Hero Engine is horribly, horribly, optimized. It's not a matter of having a better graphics card or a better CPU. It's not a matter of turning your settings down low. You guys should have noticed that on GPU-Z, your video card load rarely exceeds 50%. The fact is, you could have a $10,000 computer, and still see horrible FPS drops. The engine isn't coded well and cannot handle multiple people performing multiple activities. Every time a player performs a movement or ability or skill, the server has to transmit this data back to YOUR client-side to recreate it. Now imagine 16 or 50 or 75 people all simultaneously doing this every second. This is what's causing the frame rate drops.

 

Try this simple test to illustrate my point. Go to the PVP area on the fleet which is usually very busy. Now stand by one of the PVP gear vendors, go into a corner, and zoom in on the wall, so that there is nothing on your screen. Now check your FPS. Notice how it's tanking? Why is it that the FPS is fluctuating when there's nothing moving on your screen and all you're seeing is an ugly texture? Because of the engine. Bioware knows this, but a this point, only small optimizations can be done to the Hero Engine. It's costly and frankly speaking there are other priorities in this game for the devs.

 

we all know what the cause of the problem is. i think what i want, and maybe other people as well, is for the devs to acknowledge that, and then at least attempt to fix it.

 

and from what i understand about the hero engine, i thought it could be modified while live? wasnt that supposed to be one of the perks of using it?

 

it should be a priority. if a top end gaming rig is struggling to play this, what is it like on the average non-gaming optimized PC? players will not put up with crappy performance for long.

 

altho you are right about the devs having other priorities; the cartel network seems to be the new focus

I'm sure the engine can be modified when it's live. We've seen blog posts in the last year of how they've done minor optimizations to shadows or textures. They have made it so the shadows don't absolutely murder your FPS, which is good and I'm happy about this. But to actually fix the base problem, which is that this engine wasn't built from the start to smoothly handle this many people grouped up, would require a major code change from the ground-up. A major code change like this would only make it live into an expansion or something. You can't rework that much code and push it onto a 1.x patch - too much could break and if it did, it would be a disaster. We can hope 2.0 or whatever the expansion is fixes it little by little! Edited February 20, 2013 by revcrisis

IMO this game is not ready for an expansion. It is taking focus away from fixing and testing things that really need to improve in the game. Fix what is broken, don't cover it up with more broken content.

 

100% agreed.

 

I'd honestly be happier if BW used this time to fix or redo the entire game engine instead of working on the expansion.

 

I run everything at max settings but my comp still bogs in the fleet or where there's more than 20 ppl nearby. I know it's not my system (a very good one at that) if I can get over 60 FPS in GW2 with over 70 ppl in a WvWvW, or 200 FPS in a 25m WoW raid, 80 FPS in crowded Orgrimmar.

I am not an expert but I am told much of the issue here is the Hero Engine does not support large group settings well. Guess they should have known that before the y purchased it or designed their own (more time/money) like WOW did.

 

From what I heard Hero engine could handle over 10k players at once and the only problem is that Bioware was not able to optimize it because EA wanted to release the game too early. We have to blame EA, not Bioware

From what I heard Hero engine could handle over 10k players at once and the only problem is that Bioware was not able to optimize it because EA wanted to release the game too early. We have to blame EA, not Bioware

 

thats it in a nutshell.

 

bioware approached the Hero Engine's developers and offered to buy it. Hero Engine people said sure, but it is not finished. bioware people said np, we've got coders that can finish it, here is a pile of cash. you can find one of the guys who was part of the deal saying more or less this if you go to the Hero Engine site.