Low performance, FPS drops

First part where you stated:

I'd also like to mention, that when I put AA on high or very high, the water, quest symbols over NPC heads, and various other graphics disappear completely.

This is a known issue with the Crimson Drivers on AMD cards.  A new version 15.12 came out two days ago, try upgrading to that version.  If your on that version and your still having the issue, then they haven't resolved it yet and you'll need to do one of the following:

1. Lower your AA setting to Medium or lower

2. Uninstall the Crimson driver and use a previous version like version 14 which doesn't have that issue.

As far as the FPS drops, you'll need to first try to add swtor.exe and launcher.exe to your anti-virus and firewall safe list.  If that doesn't help grab www.pingplotter.com and run this to the servers when playing and see what it graphs , this graph can be saved as a JPG and uploaded here or Imgur and linked.

If you play on an East Coast server: 159.153.92.28
If you play on a West Coast server: 159.153.68.252
If you play on a European server: 159.153.72.252

Hello, and thank you for your answer.

I am currently re-downloading the game after turning off bit-raider and the streaming client as per the guide I found on these forums, so plotting ping to the server would have to wait until it's done. I'll do it after the download is finished and I can re-launch the game, and post the image.

I'd like to point out though, that my latency is a stable 80-90 MS.

Regarding the AA issue: I have the latest version, and I don't mind turning the AA down the medium, I've been playing like that since I started playing. I'd like to note that Very High AA or Off had no effect on my FPS issues.

I hope the bit-raider disable thing fixes the issue.

Ah ok so your using version 15.12.  Good to know, I was waiting till they fixed the issue before upgrading but I guess it's till not resolved.  Let us know how the removal of bit raider goes for you.

Well, it's better. More stable. I can get 45 stable-ish FPS on the fleet, 60 even if there aren't many people around.

And turning my camera during combat didn't result in a drop to 10 FPS.

I'd hoped for better, but I can settle for this I guess. Is there anything else I don't know about that can improve the FPS ?

EDIT - I take it back, wandering in Rishi's main town area dropped me to 20. Exploring a bit more and I noticed the improvement wasn't as good as I'd hoped.

It made it a bit more "smooth", the FPS drops aren't as steep as before, but they are still there.

I would go ahead and run pingplotter using the steps above and post your results by saving them as a JPG file and attaching directly or using a site like imgur to upload and then link the image.

Here is the image. I hope that helps. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but it feels like it's not related to connection. I tried reducing graphic settings to very low, and had no performance issues whatsoever ☹️

Can anyone please help me figure out why I get such low performance ?

It doesn't make any sense. Is there anything I missed ? Some Windows 10 / GPU / Driver / Game configuration / tweak I missed ?

Not specific areas, but there seems to be some weird logic to it.

Last night, I set the graphic settings to Ultra, and it dropped from 60 FPS in certain cases to 5. It's most noticeable during cutscenes. Reached the planet Odessen and watched the entire intro cutscene and walked around and it was a near stable 60 FPS, but suddenly in a different cutscene when talking to someone, dropped to 11. Had a cut scene when it was zoomed on a door and for a moment the FPS was in the single digits. It seems to happen more often when the camera is zoomed in like a close-up.

Here's a situation where my FPS was the worst I've seen, with no apparent reason. But spoilers

The amount of "stuff" happening on the screen doesn't seem to affect the FPS, but what I'm looking at.

I dropped the graphic settings to very low, and joined a war-zone, still had drops to 20-10.

Try turning off Shadows.  There are issues in this game with Shadows.

You can also try running in Fullscreen(Windowed)  -- I heard that helps with FPS.

I've got a pretty good computer and with Shadows on it gives me fits.  I run everything else

full up.