What's my bottleneck?

I'm running SWTOR on a fast SSD and it still lags in the Black Sun area of Coruscant and in pvp. This is NOT a hardware issue on any of his PC's - both are more than capable of running games fine and his home PC will easily outperform his work PC in *ANY* other game because the graphics are so superior.

Let me explain it simply so you might have a chance of understanding -

I went to my mates place for the past 3 days and played on his old pc which has the same CPU as mine, same RAM and a graphics card that is only 25% as fast. HIS SYSTEM WORKED BETTER EVEN THOUGH IT WAS THE SAME CPU, RAM AND MUCH SLOWER GRAPHICS CARD.

ARE YOU GETTING THIS YET. IT'S QUITE SIMPLE REALLY.

Yes, the black sun area needs optimized. As do many other areas. BioWare is NOT getting a free pass. Performance needs to be addressed. I get it, ok? All I'm saying is that my work PC is capable of running an apparently poorly optimized area pretty freakin good despite not having as good of a GPU as my home PC. So I would like my home PC to do whatever my work PC happens to be doing to run a poorly optimized area pretty well.

That's it. There isn't anything more to it. Maybe SWTOR is not using it's RAM efficiently. Maybe it's not multi-threading where it should. It doesn't matter. The point is that there is a difference between the two PCs and one happens to win out in a very specific scenario.

It doesn't matter. The PC that runs the problem area smoothly is a working model that can be emulated. If I built a second PC with the exact same specs as my work PC then the problem area would still run smooth on the second PC. That means that my working model is duplicatable. It's not magic. So if I get my home specs as close to the specs of the working model then I will hopefully be able to also run the problem area smooth as butter.

Make sense? Or are you really that dense? I'm not saying BW can't fix the area to make it run better on more machines. I'm simply saying that whatever crappy performance issues BW designed into that area aren't manifesting on my work PC because it is beefy enough in some area to mitigate the problem.

Upgrade ur ram, but always keep identicle ram in ur slots. So if u have 2 slots buy 2 sticks of ram and replace the old stick. Also check ur mother board and see how much ram itll take. I reccomend ripjaws g skillz.

IMO try the RAM increase. It will be the cheapest by far and may improve your gameplay some.
But some of the other posters do have a point. People with very expensive computers are having issues. Point being- just because you upgrade does not mean it will run better, and may in fact run worse.
Thats why I advise to try a cheap upgrade, like RAM, before anything.

But one has to wonder why the work comp with an 8800 runs it better than a home comp with a 560? Does a gig or 2 of RAM make that much of a difference? One would have to question the game engine at some point.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

What do you mean by identical RAM? My mobo has four slots and a maximum of 8gb I think.

I already have 3 1gb sticks in it. If I buy a single 4gb stick and put it in the 4th slot is that going to be fine?

I would have 3 1gb sticks and 1 4gb stick for a total of 7gb of RAM. Is that alright?

I have 100+ FPS at all times, max settings.

InHell I5-2500k @ 4.5Ghz
16GB DDR3-1600Mhz
GTX 570
HDDS:
OS @ Cache: 90 GB corsair force3 550mb/s
Installs 2x 500GB in raid-0
Store 4x 1TB in raid-5

However I have this dynamic switching tech on my Motherboard making the GPU in the CPU work together with the GTX 570, instead of running there own monitor. Might give better performance. I have no DVI,VGA or HDMI port on my motherboard. Instead the 2 GPU's are supposed to work together.


LucidLogix® Virtu

Universal Switchable Graphics Technology
LucidLogix® Virtu GPU virtualization dynamically assigns tasks to the best available graphics resources based on power, performance and system load on Windows® 7 based PCs. It allows users to fully utilize the unique capabilities of advanced Sandy Bridge multimedia features alongside the high end 3D rendering performance provided by installed graphics cards. When no discrete graphics are needed, the graphics card is put in idle mode to lower utilization, heat, fan speed and power draw down to near zero, making the system more environmentally-friendly. For users with diverse needs, LucidLogix® Virtu GPU virtualization provides great flexibility and efficiency.

Universal Switchable Graphics
LucidLogix® Virtu's GPU virtualization technology assigns tasks to the best available GPU, allowing dynamic graphics switching between integrated graphics and NVIDIA® or AMD graphics cards.

And this shaite:
Intel® Smart Response Technology boosts overall system performance. It uses an installed fast SSD (min 18.6GB available capacity) as a cache for frequently accessed data. Harness the combination of SSD-like performance and response with hard drive capacity, that's 4X faster than a HDD-only system.

You just don't get that I'm actually trying to help you. Have you read the 500-page performance issues threads in customer service?

Don't believe for a second that even the EXACT same PC will perform EXACTLY the same. You get ability lag in that area too - it might actually be an ISP issue or something else entirely unrelated to hardware. It could have been a windows download or anything but don't take my word for it - go ahead and spend a fortune on a new PC just to find it still runs like crap - there are plenty of people in other threads who have monster PC's and still find the game runs like crap on it.

I understand that very well. But there is nothing wrong with identifying bottlenecks by comparing two PCs. If I upgrade my RAM and it still runs crappy then what's the harm? The game has an issue and I have more delicious RAM. That's the point I've been trying to get across to people.