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 ...
Forum Discussion
@BAYoung wrote:
With World of Warcraft, Guild Wars and Star Wars having the same issue it doesn't look like it's a game related thing.
Games like Skyrim, Saint's Row 4, Mortal Kombat 9 and Oblivion are unaffected.
CPU usage while in game is high at 80% or higher.
Have you confirmed what is using the CPU % when it occurs in task manager
proxos666 wrote:
Have you confirmed what is using the CPU % when it occurs in task manager
Not exactly; it jumps around lot with the game in question using the majority of CPU; I narrowed it down to the paging file and avast anti-virus services. Just tested and it's just Star Wars or the other games using most of the CPU... just alt+tabbed now and CPU was 77% with Star Wars and Chrome using the most of it.
I test with Chrome open because I used to have Skype and a good few tabs of Chrome open while playing without incident.
If you have a a lot of hard drive activity, and the FPS drops occurs when the HDD gets "idle" I think it is swapfile related.
Your games will benefit from a RAM update to 8 GB in any case.
Would be an idea to check your swapfile settings in Windows, I think the activity on HDD stops because whether the file is full, or HDD tends to get full.
Is the Windows swap file on the same physical drive as your games ? I remember reading you having two drives, try reallocating it to the drives which is not your gaming drive.
Side note : This game profits a lot from running on an SSD.
That post doesn't tell me where to find anything xD Call me dense but I dunno what they're on about.
I installed avast from an installer I downloaded years ago and let it update to the current version; regardless, do you think reinstalling it is the next thing to try? I've never had trouble with it before.
@proxos666 wrote:Simplest thing is uninstall avast see if the games are still the same
can always install avast again later
I haven't done that as there's already a marked improvement on CPU usage since the Avast Service thing was disabled in the clean startup.
I checked if Windows did updates on the days leading up to and since the last time it ran really well and it's not an update; prior to 09-10-2015 the last update Windows installed was in August.
Since it's only the online games being affected could it be an issue with Network components? I'm ruling out the card because if it was a failure there it would be immediate and complete rather than a slow degradation, but perhaps the fault is in the network cable itself?
If not, what else can I look at?
No issues now.
I don't know how or why but there's no issue in SWToR at the moment. Whatever the problem was it's fixed... don't know what happened. Any ideas?
Can only surmise maybe a combination of high memory usage and avast tying up resources
Just ensure you have a form of Antivirus installed even if just Microsoft Security Essentials
Don't know what it was; glad it's fixed though, whatever it is.
I'm really grateful for all your assistance though. It went above and beyond anything I've come to expect from anyone on the internet so thank you very much!
