Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?

If this is true in any possible way. Then there is probably a misguided assumption to what is happening.

As some one pointed out the second process IS the server. It's not being transimited to another server out on the interent. It's purely local.

The purpose of the second process is very likely similar to WoW Warden.
For those that don't know. Warden is a app that runs in the background to try and identify cheating. These include

Model Changes(people would remove the Gate model in PvP to get an early lead)
Net Code(people would block damage code and resend good health codes)
Memory hacks(changing speed of moving and other cheats)

I was wondering if SWTOR would have some form of Warden and it sounds like they do. The OP posting this practically says this is what is happening, but the information is interpreted with a mistake. Though grats to the people who found it.

the more and more we reduce what might be "sent from the server for DRM", the closer and closer we get to it just running like a normal MMO. You know.. the data of what's going on and who's doing what being sent by the server to our clients to render. Obviously, that can cause lag if your client isn't receiving the info in a timely manner. This is something that will always exist with MMOs.

Sigh.. let me take the time to respond to you, and explain. Hopefully you'll take the time to read this, and it won't get buried under other pages.


Yes, your computer runs Crysis well, I'm sure it does. This does not mean your computer can handle 5+ versions of TOR running at the same time.

It ends up computers are kinda complicated!!

For instance, lets take Minecraft. Really, REALLY simple game, right? The textures are low-res, the models are just BLOCKS, literally just cubes. So your computer should be able to run about 1,000,000+ versions of Minecraft at the same time, since it can handle Crysis, right?

Well, yes and no. You're right that Crysis is 100x as detailed in models as Minecraft. The models are in the thousands of polys / tris and minecraft is in the tens of polys.

However, Crysis has its own efficient, ground-up C++ engine, which handles those assets as well as possible, uses the DirectX game library for low-level asset management and rendering, and other technologies. In short: lots and lots and lots of people have worked for a long time to make it as efficient as bloody possible.

Minecraft, on the other hand, runs on Java, which is a virtual machine which has to run on top of your computer. The code does not run natively (which is to say, as machine code, in the language of your processor. You see, different processors have different architectures, which require the program to be compiled again in that language. To avoid having to recompile, java runs as an interpreted language where a program called an interpreter, java, translates the minecraft java code into code your machine can run, but it does this as it goes, so it is much slower than native C++ code. Java's been worked on for years, so it is much faster now, much faster than it used to be, but the overhead is such that it is still much, much slower than C++. You could *never* run Crysis in Java. It would run too slow. )

You could have a machine that is liquid nitrogen cooled up to 5GHz or something stupid and you still couldn't run Crysis level games in a Java environment.

See what I'm getting at?

My computer can run Crysis 2 smooth, but sometimes Minecraft runs slow. Its the same computer. And minecraft is not, I assure you, sending textures or animations over the internet. lol.

There ARE high res textures in the game right now, if you put your settings on HIGH then during cutscenes you can see a difference in quality, bump mapping is present where it is not on the medium level textures. Go to your ship and click the intercom, it'll flash to high res and right back to medium, this should be obvious and dramatic if you look closely.

Why high resolution textures aren't available in the main game when the texture assets are there is anybody's guess. There has to be some bug the developers are working on. I agree with you, if it was just a performance issue, they should allow it, and some people could handle it and some people would have to turn down to medium.

This is indeed an area of concern and people are attempting to get information from the devs about it. The community leaders have said they are speaking with the development team to make sure they don't give us the wrong information.

Again, I can force AntiAliasing on my computer locally using the Nvidia Control Manager for my Graphics Card. If you can do that, it means the video you're seeing is being rendered from my graphics card, locally. It would not apply it to a random video stream, only things that are being sent through the DirectX pipeline.

There are lots of other reasons why we can verify this is NOT happening, as I've stated on other posts. I won't repeat them.

This thread doesn't seem to make any sense.

What.

I see a lot of speculation, and a lot of people debunking that. I would like those debunkers to explain what the second SWTOR.exe is doing with a sustained 100% of one of my cores.

Sent it over to kotaku and other sites. Hopefully they run something on this as they and joystix have made posts about swtor performance

they more this gets out there the better.

Whats your fragmentation like? Windows NTFS and FAT are notoriously terrible about managing fragmentation. Download SmartDefrag for free and run it on the drive with SWTOR on "deep optimize" and let it go all night (it'll take several hours). Fragmentation could absolutely cause slow loading performance, even on a very fast HDD.

Yes a coincidence. Inconclusive and doubtful sir.

It very well could be related to asset management. However, if it's not hitting the web then the streaming idea is jacked. Just because it's processing data doesn't mean it's streaming that data from the internet.