Sudden Performance Drop: SWToR
Hey, On 1 October 2015 I resubbed to Star Wars The Old Republic. I played up to and including Tuesday 6 October 2015 with more than adequate frame rate (fps); the game ran really smooth. I logged ...
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Deleted DiskCacheArena and I got to about 10 minutes before it got as low as 5 fps.
This is quests on Nar Shadaa - graphics were set to default.
I did set the graphics to the lowest possible with no change; even AA and bloom and Shadows were off and the problem persists.
I have checked CPU and CPU temperatures and the highest recorded was 50 degrees Celsius which, as far as I know, is within acceptable levels.
I will attempt the clean install of display drivers tomorrow although I'm reliably lead to believe that a conflict between the Nvidia and the HD 4600 but at this point I'll try pretty much anything if it can get the game working like it should.
All of your suggestions are plausible, although why would they suddenly start causing issues with only one game (as SWToR is the only game so affected) after 5-6 days of playing?
It was literally a case of the game running perfectly when I shut the PC off on Tuesday night, and then it ran terribly the next day for no apparent reason.
I still had Chrome and Skype open while playing from the 1st to the 6th. Even had Windows Aero on.
I'll try turning that off to see how it goes though I can't imagine why it would suddenly make a difference xD
I appreciate the input regardless and will follow up on your advice.
Yeah, 50 degrees is largely acceptable for both CPU and GPU. Beyond 90 is worrysome and may cause downclocking.
I have an odd feeling your game is somehow running on the HD 4600, which gives 5-10 fps on medium settings. Heck, it's even a slideshow on Low settings.
I'm not sure I know how to disable the on-board via the BIOS; as a rule I stay out of there because I generally stuff something up regardless of what I do. So I'll just clean off the drivers I currently have for the Nvidia and do a fresh install.
Normally, NVidia Optimus will deal with the activation of the NVidia card, but for some odd reason sometimes the Intel driver doesn't let it do that. Doing a complete cleanup and reinstall of both drivers should fix the issue.
I've found that half of the nvidia side programs, like the GeForce Experience, doesn't do much because my card isn't supported apparently; any reason to think Optimus would be?
Just to go a different tact your system only has 4GB Ram, will benefit going to 8GB
Shut down as much of the background programs as possible before playing, does the HDD appear to always be doing something ?
Look for Disk Thrashing this could affect performance if the page file is in heavy use
If only getting more memory was that simple; for various reasons it's not an option at this time.
There's a lot of read activity; star wars being the most of it while it's active. After a while, when idle, everything drops to below 50k B/sec with star wars swtor_main_bnk_streamed_a_1.tor and swtor_main_bnk_streamed_a_1.tor going to the high 100k B/sec.
The paging file does seem to be in heavy use though I have no idea if that's normal or not; we're kind of going beyond anything I've ever looked into before; it's reading often but the highest I saw it at was around 40k B/sec.
I would know if any of this is really high or what to do about it if it is.
I did do a clean installation of my graphics drivers but that just seems to have made it worse; upon login today the game started at around 20 fps and it hasn't gone higher since at lowest graphic settings and in combat it drops to below 10.
Also Windows Aero is off and I had nothing on in the background that shouldn't have been there. All of which is kind of moot because I had loads in the background between the 1st and the 6th of October and the game still ran perfectly.
