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The Unofficial TOR and Boot Camp Discussion Thread


daemian

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Note: This is not a discussion about OS X, or a 'Windows vs Mac' topic. Comments along those lines will be flagged as off topic. Enjoy!

 

For all of you Star Wars fans wanting to get TOR running well on your Mac using Windows, hopefully you find the following info useful. Feel free to discuss...

 

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WHAT IS BOOT CAMP?

 

Boot Camp is a utility that assists with installing and running Windows on a Mac. It's not always needed to install Windows on a Mac, but many people find it very helpful.

 

It is not a virtual environment. Boot Camp will install a native version of Windows which will perform exactly as it would on any other machine with the same specs, along with software drivers for any Apple hardware.

 

Although there are no plans currently for a Mac version, Bioware has said it's something they would like to do at some point. For now, they have mentioned Boot Camp as an alternative for Mac users who want to play TOR.

 

"...we will make sure it works well 'on Boot Camp'."

- James Ohlen, New York Comic Con, October 14, 2011

 

Please note that officially Bioware's Tech Support only offers help for running the game in Windows. This doesn't extend to OS X or issues related to Boot Camp or Apple hardware.

 

 

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

 

You'll be able to play TOR as long as your Mac meets the following minimum system requirements.

 

Operating System: Star Wars ™: The Old Republic ™ can be played on Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7.

 

Computer: Your computer should have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better, and an Intel Core 2 Duo Processor 2.0GHz or better.

 

RAM: Your computer's RAM should be as follows: for Windows XP: 1.5GB, and for Windows Vista and Windows 7: 2GB. For PCs using a built-in graphical chipset, 2GB RAM recommended.

 

Video: Your computer's graphics card should be ATI X1800 or better, nVidia 7800 or better, or Intel 4100 Integrated Graphics or better.

 

Internet connection required to play.

 

IMPORTANT:

 

1. Before you begin, back up your files.

 

2. Please make sure your Windows partition is big enough for your version of Windows and SWTOR, and any other files you may need. Not just now, but also in the future - this includes future expansions to TOR. I recommend a minimum of 100GB partition, but the more room you can spare, the better. Once you have Windows installed, you may find you want to add some more games that you can't play in OS X. If you make it too small, fixing it later is not a simple process and is a huge pain.

 

3. Read the Setup Guide through at least once, carefully, before doing anything.

 

The links below should get you started...

 

 

USEFUL LINKS

 

Windows 7 Boot Camp FAQ:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3986

 

Boot Camp Setup Guide for OS X 10.7:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/boot_camp_install-setup_10.7.pdf

(note: this version supports Windows 7 only. The included drivers may not be compatible with XP or Vista.)

 

Boot Camp Setup Guide for OS X 10.6:

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en_US/Boot_Camp_Install-Setup_10.6.pdf

 

Not sure what the specs on your Mac are? Look them up here:

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/index-apple-specs-applespec.html

 

Confirm your hardware's compatibility with the minimum specs here:

http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/cyri/

(take these results with a grain of salt)

 

For more info on how to get started with Boot Camp, check here first:

http://www.apple.com/support/bootcamp/

 

Curious about your Macbook video card? Find it here:

http://www.notebookcheck.net/

 

Having trouble getting your Macbook to recognize 64-bit drivers?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=6918301&postcount=1

 

Important info for installing Windows 7 on an iMac (27-inch, Late 2009) and iMac (21.5-inch, Mid 2010):

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3173

 

2009 iMac & Macbook Pro EFI firmware updates:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3561

 

Some tips and suggestions for dealing with low FPS issues can be found on

page 16 of this thread (thanks to ineidzcode for posting)

 

Speeding up performance in Windows 7:

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1198

 

From the dev team:

A Note on General Performance Issues

 

A NOTE ABOUT DRIVERS:

 

Sound and video drivers are the thing I see people having trouble with the most when they make the switch to Windows. Following the steps below, I have not had a single driver issue in Windows 7, although sometimes it's tricky to find the version that's compatible with certain games due to the frequent updates.

 

The drivers that are installed when you use Boot Camp are there to get you up and running, but they may not be the best available. Experimenting with different (usually newer) drivers can often improve performance. If you find you're having trouble after an update, follow these steps again and reinstall a previous version.

 

Before updating any drivers, I always do the following:

  • uninstall or delete any old versions of the one I'm installing.
  • run a free program called Driver Sweeper to find and delete any straggling files that didn't get removed.
  • run another free program called CCleaner to clean out any leftover files and registry entries.
  • restart.

It's not something OS X users are used to dealing with, but with the proper drivers, your Mac will run Windows games at least as well as any PC with equivalent specs.

 

Good luck! ;)

Edited by daemian
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I'm not using a 2011 Macbook Pro but I'm getting great performance with 11.10. I'll probably upgrade to 11.11 this week.

 

You mind telling me what great is?

 

I'm at around 20-30 FPS on 1660x1440 and the newest Catalyst drivers, all things on lowest. Thought I could do a bit better than that.

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You mind telling me what great is?

 

I'm at around 20-30 FPS on 1660x1440 and the newest Catalyst drivers, all things on lowest. Thought I could do a bit better than that.

 

My specs: 2008 Mac Pro, 2.8 GHz 8-core, 12GB RAM, Radeon HD6970 2GB

 

At 1920x1200 I'm getting 60-110 FPS depending on the area, all settings on max with AA and AF boosted in Catalyst. My GPU is running at 64 degrees at 99% load, which is slightly more demanding than it was in beta.

 

The old thread is deleted but so I can't refer back to older posts, but I would have thought you'd be getting better than that. Do you have anything turned up high in Catalyst? If I turn AA up more than 4x my FPS drops like a stone. Also make sure your computer is using the discrete GPU and not defaulting to the intel integrated graphics.

 

Hopefully someone with the same specs can post their results to compare.

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My specs: 2008 Mac Pro, 2.8 GHz 8-core, 12GB RAM, Radeon HD6970 2GB

 

At 1920x1200 I'm getting 60-110 FPS depending on the area, all settings on max with AA and AF boosted in Catalyst. My GPU is running at 64 degrees at 99% load, which is slightly more demanding than it was in beta.

 

The old thread is deleted but so I can't refer back to older posts, but I would have thought you'd be getting better than that. Do you have anything turned up high in Catalyst? If I turn AA up more than 4x my FPS drops like a stone. Also make sure your computer is using the discrete GPU and not defaulting to the intel integrated graphics.

 

Hopefully someone with the same specs can post their results to compare.

 

That is pretty sexy, sounds better than mine.

 

Are you turning stuff on in Catalyst or are you turning them on in game? V-Sync or no?

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I'm new to Boot Camp (got it up and running a month or so ago specifically for ToR), so I haven't messed around with drivers at all. I only got to see the game for the Thanksgiving weekend test, and it ran perfectly well. I had some mouse issues, but they are system-wide issues I'm working on resolving across the board, not a result of this game. Otherwise, I got, from what I remember, very good FPS, no graphical issues to note, running everything relatively high but not going overboard with things like ground item density and so on (can't remember the exact names for this stuff, since, as I say, I only had access for that weekend and am not back in yet).

 

15" top spec off the shelf Macbook Pro 2011, btw (was never intended for gaming, but works just fine).

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That is pretty sexy, sounds better than mine.

 

Are you turning stuff on in Catalyst or are you turning them on in game? V-Sync or no?

 

V-sync is off in TOR. My Catalyst settings:

 

AA - 4x w/ morphological filtering; override app settings; edge detect

AF - 4x

Tesselation - AMD optimized (max)

Catalyst A.I. - High, Enable surface format optimization

Wait for refresh - off

AA mode - Performance

OpenGL settings - Triple buffering

 

Based on catabuca's post above, I think you should be able to improve performance quite a bit if you can figure out what's going on.

Edited by daemian
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I'm new to Boot Camp (got it up and running a month or so ago specifically for ToR), so I haven't messed around with drivers at all. I only got to see the game for the Thanksgiving weekend test, and it ran perfectly well. I had some mouse issues, but they are system-wide issues I'm working on resolving across the board, not a result of this game. Otherwise, I got, from what I remember, very good FPS, no graphical issues to note, running everything relatively high but not going overboard with things like ground item density and so on (can't remember the exact names for this stuff, since, as I say, I only had access for that weekend and am not back in yet).

 

15" top spec off the shelf Macbook Pro 2011, btw (was never intended for gaming, but works just fine).

 

You mind looking at your Catalyst drivers + in game setting and taking a screenshot and posting it here? I'm not sure what's wrong, my Macbook Pro should be the same as yours.

 

I had issues with the current catalyst. What I found worked for me was to install the Omega drivers/tool for ATI.

 

Thanks, I'll try those too.

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You mind looking at your Catalyst drivers + in game setting and taking a screenshot and posting it here? I'm not sure what's wrong, my Macbook Pro should be the same as yours.

 

Thanks, I'll try those too.

 

As I said in my first post, I'm new to bootcamp, and I haven't done anything at all to my drivers, I haven't even downloaded or installed CCC (although I'm looking into it). Everything is as it was out of the box. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know, but I've had no issues so far.

 

I'm not currently in game, haven't got access again yet, so I can't post screenshots of my in-game settings either, but when I get in I'll make sure to come back with my settings.

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I had been running SWTOR on my 2010 macbook pro (quad core i7 2.4 Ghz, 8 GB RAM, Geforce 330M video card) inside of windows 7 64 bit.

 

It ran pretty well in beta but was pretty terrible in the live client. Some areas, I got 60 FPS on medium at 1440. Some areas I got 20 FPS on low at 1280. I couldn't find any series of settings to make it solid.

 

The game breaking part was that I got 3-5 second freezes every minute or so. They were pervasive. They even happened on character creation (though not on the queue screen.) The longer I played or the worse the environment, the more frequent they were.

 

PvE questing was manageable though frustrating. PvP was impossible. I'm playing a scoundrel so I would be on somebody, lock up, now they're out of range. Lag was really bad too. I'd have someone stunned, be right on top of them and it would say out of range.

 

These problems may have been isolated to my computer. I used it for work, so my bootcamp install was also my vmware image when I'm in mac os x. Maybe there's some incompatibility.

 

However, I ran 3Dmark and got above average scores for my hardware and didn't notice any stuttering or freezing during its progress. Also, I never had the problem in beta. So, it seemed to either have been introduced after beta or by some software that i installed during that time.

 

Has anyone else had similar issues on a macbook pro running windows 7 both in bootcamp and vmware fusion?

 

I decided I needed a personal (non-work) laptop capable of gaming and picked one up, so hopefully once I get this installed, it's not a problem for me any more, but maybe I'll help someone with the same issues avoid the hours of debugging (and subsequent queue time) that I went through.

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can anyone help me with sound issue i can't hear any sound on my comp in windows mode i have tried abunch of things to fix no luck so far? im using vista and leopard

 

Can you post the specs of your Mac? That might help with troubleshooting.

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I had been running SWTOR on my 2010 macbook pro (quad core i7 2.4 Ghz, 8 GB RAM, Geforce 330M video card) inside of windows 7 64 bit.

 

It ran pretty well in beta but was pretty terrible in the live client. Some areas, I got 60 FPS on medium at 1440. Some areas I got 20 FPS on low at 1280. I couldn't find any series of settings to make it solid.

 

The game breaking part was that I got 3-5 second freezes every minute or so. They were pervasive. They even happened on character creation (though not on the queue screen.) The longer I played or the worse the environment, the more frequent they were.

 

I'd expect you'd have to keep the settings fairly low to get steady performance with that GPU. I had a similar issue with my FPS dropping in the latest build, then I discovered I had some things set too high in Catalyst Control Centre that were seriously impacting performance. Dropping AA from 8x to 4x gave me a huge boost.

 

You may want to check your settings in the Nvidia control panel and tweak things like shadows and view distance to get back to a stable FPS. If it was working in beta and nothing else has changed it's probably just one of these settings.

Edited by daemian
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I think the real problem is that on a MACBOOK it recognizes HALF of your processing power on Bootcamp.

 

Both my Brother and my husband have mac laptops and they aren't really able to play. The processing power is just too limited.

 

I have A Mac Pro and I have no problems... BUT I have an 8 CORE machine with 22 gigs of RAM (I do heavy 3d modeling so the RAM is for rendering). I also dedicated one of my 4 HDs just to Bootcamp. The PC side has a dedicated HD and that helps out a lot.

 

I think in order to really play this game on a mac, you need a really powerful mac to do so.

 

 

My other suggestion would be making sure everything is up to speed update wise. I had a lot of updates to do.

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can anyone help me with sound issue i can't hear any sound on my comp in windows mode i have tried abunch of things to fix no luck so far? im using vista and leopard

 

Make sure you let BootCamp burn the disk with the drivers on it. Beyond that poke around in device manager (in Windows via Control Panel) see if anything is 'unknown' or marked as not working.

 

If the drivers are in... you might need to turn up the volume (assuming Vista has 7's version of PulseAudio/CoreAudio and individual volume controls per app).

 

If normal sound is working and TOR's sound isn't hmm... not sure but I'd raise it with EA/Bioware support. as you are running Windows and should be under support.

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I think the real problem is that on a MACBOOK it recognizes HALF of your processing power on Bootcamp.

 

MacBook Pro's don't suffer from this however. It's very odd that BootCamp'd it'd not pick up on the proper processor/cores as it is, essentialy at that point, a WinTel box (complete with BIOS as far as Windows is aware). Are you sure Windows isn't displaying a combined graph for all cores in Task Manager?

 

XP sees 2 cores, 7 sees 2 cores, Vbox sees 2 cores and so on and so forth; which is correct as being a 2009 vintage MBP it's got a Core 2 Duo.

 

Curiously though I get double the RAM assigned to the 9400M in Windows than OS X allocates (512v256).

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@ oMGitsree, most 2008 or newer Macs will be able to play the game, but if you have an integrated card you will most likely have to stick to low settings. Also at least 4 GB of RAM is recommended based on the reports I've seen. In the old thread (90+ pages) we had lots of people posting their results... apart from the usual driver issues, most people were getting really decent performance once they found the best settings for their GPU.

 

A Mac Pro will certainly have no trouble at all with the game, though. I'm on a 2008 MP, it rocks.

 

@ Ghosthawks, as I (and others) have said it's most likely a driver issue. If you can post your machine's specs we might be able to help you further. We'll need more info than where you bought it ;) - CPU, GPU, RAM, year and model would be great.

Edited by daemian
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if im in mac mode sound is fine when i switch two windows no sound on comp at all and its says no recorded driver and next two dcirrus sound file yellow exclamation point

 

Have you tried burning a disk with the Boot Camp drivers?

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@ oMGitsree, most 2008 or newer Macs will be able to play the game, but if you have an integrated card you will most likely have to stick to low settings. Also at least 4 GB of RAM is recommended based on the reports I've seen. In the old thread (90+ pages) we had lots of people posting their results... apart from the usual driver issues, most people were getting really decent performance once they found the best settings for their GPU.

 

A Mac Pro will certainly have no trouble at all with the game, though. I'm on a 2008 MP, it rocks.

 

@ ghosthawks, as I (and others) have said it's most likely a driver issue. If you can post your machine's specs we might be able to help you further. We'll need more info than where you bought it ;) - CPU, GPU, RAM, year and model would be great.

 

I am running on an early 2008 mp as well. I am having a difficult time getting my fps to a good place. Would you mind sharing your nvidea settings? I have tampered with them and it is better than it was but still very difficult to play, fps ranging from 20 standing still to 5-10 running around.

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I am running on an early 2008 mp as well. I am having a difficult time getting my fps to a good place. Would you mind sharing your nvidea settings? I have tampered with them and it is better than it was but still very difficult to play, fps ranging from 20 standing still to 5-10 running around.

 

I haven't tried playing TOR with the stock 8800 GT. I use an HD6970 (2GB) when I'm in Windows, so I can't tell you what the settings would be right now for Nvidia. If I get a chance I'll boot up the game with the 8800 and see what kind of performance I'm getting.

 

If you haven't done this already, I would make sure you're not forcing AA or AF and keep all enhancements off in Nvidia control panel. Also check to see if you have the latest driver (a generic driver may give you better performance in Windows than the Apple version). Set everything to medium, reduce shadows, bloom and draw distance in TOR and see if that shows any improvement.

Edited by daemian
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