What's my bottleneck?

Yeah well sadly unless you take a video of it we'll never know the truth. My screenshots prove that the game can be 17 fps or 66 fps at almost the exact same point.

I can easily screenshot 60+ fps in Black Sun, but I know it's generally sub-20 fps.

http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (1).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (2).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (3).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (4).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (5).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (6).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (7).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (8).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...FireSS (9).jpg
http://www.codetunnel.com/content/im...ireSS (10).jpg

That's the best I can do. I immediately pressed Print Screen 10 times in a row with only about half a second or a second between each screenshot. I am not setup to take video at the moment and nor do I care to because I would just like to play the game now that it runs well. If you still don't believe me then I'm sorry your pride is such a roadblock for you.

Your RAM and AMD sound like the culprit here. I used to run a Phenom X940 or something and 3 gigs of ram, recently upgraded to Intel I7 2600K Sandy Bridge and 8gigs of ram.

Now runs as smooth butta!! Even though Intel is x2 the cost of AMD, I will never go back. Again I am not a college crash strapped student anymore either.

If you are not willing to invest in a new CPU try getting more RAM.

Ok, I was probably unclear there. With problems I mean not performing optimal and a I5 at the same frequency will be faster on 75-80% of games. Its pretty much only First person shooter engines that are fully threaded.
Other so called threaded games still often have to wait for calculations from a single core before they can thread the rest of that chain. And when you have HT that means they are waiting on half a core really.
And that most certainly is the case for SW:Tor as I see people with HT are unsatified, while those with I5 party at the Tatoiine cantina

I bet we both agree that the I5-2500K is the best CPU for the normal gamer today. Those chips almost get insulted unless you OC them 35-40%


Sidenote:
Best value for money since the Celeron 300A that overclocked outperformed the PII-450, due to having the excact same core as PII-450, but 128K full spd cache instead of 512kb half speed cache. The Celeron 300A with its full speed cache could do 500Mhz, While the PII-450 needed extra cooling to do 500 coz of the cache used on it. And the celeron cost 1/3 of the PII-450

OC FTW!

I'm happy for you that it's working so well now, really.

It had absolutely nothing to do with your new RAM however, and you probably had really ancient graphics drivers causing you problems at first. You should have posted screenshots before changing drivers, but I guess the fact that you didn't says it all.

OMG LOL

You're unwilling to admit it was RAM but you're perfectly willing to concede that the beta driver made such a difference that I went from unplayable to almost 60 FPS? I did test it before the driver. I only decided to check my drivers after that, which the history of this thread does indeed show.


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You sound ridiculous! I truly can't believe you accused me of being blinded by pride. You're too much. I'm literally laughing out loud. LMAO! Good times. Good times.

See you guys around.

RAM is probably your biggest bottleneck here.

I had 4GB and found that my performance improved upon upgrading to a total of 12GB. I think anything over 4GB will be sufficient.

Actually no...in your particular case you were probably running extremely old drivers. Why didn't you screenshot before you changed drivers? Maybe you did and realised you still had the same crappy fps?

Are you seriously telling me that you didn't change drivers first? You went out and bought more memory before you installed new drivers? Come on...pull the other one. Show me your windows task manager so we can see how much memory you have, and are using.

Okay, seriously, think about this for a second.

He was running 3 1 GB sticks of dual channel RAM, 1 matched pair and 1 single stick in the other pair of slots. This means his motherboard switched to single channel mode.

Just making matched pairs, regardless of how much more RAM he has, would improve overall performance significantly since his board is now running in dual channel mode. It effectively doubles the throughput of the pipeline between the RAM and CPU.

Dual channel RAM is a serious performance improvement over single. Do you disagree with that statement?

Enjoy the game Chevex. The forum is always here when you're to upgrade next time

May the Swartz be with you!