10 years ago
Low FPS in SWTOR
Hello! I recently came back to play with SWTOR and I have performance, FPS problems. My problem is when I just running around, during cutscenes, dialogs I have decent fps (80-100 fps), but when I sta...
The culprit is the CPU not being able to feed the graphics card fast enough, that chip is running at 3.4ghz which seems like enough juice to run most games on max settings but a feature built into the game will tell you the basic culprit, while in game check the FPS & color in the bottom-left corner of the screen bring the FPS up with "CTRL + Shift + F" keys now the question ask here is what color is the FPS? the color indicates the "bottleneck" or related hardware causing the low FPS and it is very simple so determine so the color of the FPS is listed below. This feature has nothing to do with the Server Lag/Ping/Latency near the in-game minimap just so you don't confuse the two.
RED - CPU a.k.a. Processor.
Green - GPU a.k.a. Graphics Card.
White/Yellow - Balanced System.
I turned on the FPS meter and it turns red, when I'm in combat against like 4 enemies (pve) its around 40 fps lets say its maybe ok , out of combat its green, but out of combat I have no problem with fps, its fix 60, in warzones 20-25 fps and I doubt it my 970 gtx couldn't handle SWTOR its more like the game optimalization not good . And I think the game effect are not optimalized because when I pop only my buff out of combat its instantly drops from 60 fps to 50-45.
I read on reddit and on other forums that gtx 980 , even with titan x couldn't manage to run the game with decent fps in warzones.
I use a i7 3930k with a 970 at 2560 x 1440 on ultra , fps in combat is about 70fps average ( video example here )
warzones are a separate issue and why some have very low and some don't is a good question, that link I gave below with the wifi was a laptop with a 950m and he went from 20 - 30 fps to 60 fps in warzones.
smooth gameplay is the aim ( not to be confused with fps displayed )
try also turning off name plate scaling , and see if any change between fullscreen , fullscreen window and window mode in regards to smoothness ( this isn't aimed at increasing the displayed fps but game play smoothness )
red fps can be cpu as the cpu does render for the cache file called diskcachearena ( 1gb file ) sometimes it is worthwhile deleting this cache file , defrag the hdd then launch the game so a fresh file is created so its more congruous and not fragmented across the hard drive
Also if you have vsynch enabled turn on triple buffer in the driver and if vsynch off turn triple buffer off , whilst triple buffer was designed for open gl , I have seen tests showing a difference in directx
I totally agree with you smooth gameplay is the aim, but when fps drops suddenly from 60 to 45 or lower over and over again it slows down the gameplay not to mention the warzones, which makes the game not smooth. I already tried fullscreen , windowed fullscreen, turned off AA and shadow but it didn't help at all. I even tried with very low setting and it was still 20 fps.
like I said warzones are a separate issue , I was under the impression it was engine issues on certain systems more the others, the reason I gave the link for the laptop wifi was it was the first time I had seen any reference to making a change in warzones and his latency was unchanged before and after yet the fps rose in warzones and we know a laptop is no where as powerful as a desktop.
the game engine does wait on render on certain communications hence why there will be a pause on mounting speeders , so I wonder if there was a correlation in the laptop situation.
name plate scaling may also make an impact on playability as the cpu can get bogged down with the adobe scaleform UI ( this is the UI used in swtor )