SWTOR FPS Ilum BG Massive PvP Lag my bottle neck?

[leaver2000]

Hey all,

I've been playing SWTOR for over a month now and finally reached lvl 50. With my current build (which is posted below) I ran max setting with little to no FPS issues. Once I finally got to lvl 50 and starting joining in some of the larger PvP battle (20vs20 or more) my FPS just hit a wall. Everyone I've talked to in my guild and from what I've read on other forums indicates a rather wide spread issues specifically with the massive PvP scenarios.

I tried dropping my settings all the way down and really saw no significant improvements. I have another 4 gigs of ram on the way and plan on overclocking my GPU.

Here is the overclocking guild i had planned on using.

http://www.legionhardware.com/articles_pages/intel_core_i5_750_overclocking_guide,1.html

I guess my question is...

Is there anyone NOT seeing these lag issues in the massive PvP battles? If so what build are you using?

Do you guys see a specific bottle neck in my rig?

What can I do to solve this Lag/FPS issue?

----------------build-----------------

EVGA P55 Intel ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz (stock 2.66/ planning on over clocking to 3.2)

Patriot G Series ‘Sector 5’ Edition 4GB DDR31600 (4 more gigs on the way)

SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 6870 1GB

 

[catatafish]

Big PVP BGs are always going to make things choppier than anywhere else, so that's normal.

8gb of RAM should make things a lot better. Make sure you have Shadows turned to OFF and anti aliasing turned to OFF, as well as blooming,.....those can all eat up a lot of FPS. Also play around with Full Screen and Full Screen (Windowed). I'm pretty sure Full Screen without the windowed works better. Using the slider, put your trees and grass to the lowest setting (scroll down on the Graphics section to see this).

When I'm in big raids or BGs my CPU hits about 65% and my memory hits upper 50s percentagewise with a meter I've got running. So I bet your RAM will be quite a bit of help.

 

[leaver2000]

Big PVP BGs are always going to make things choppier than anywhere else, so that's normal.

8gb of RAM should make things a lot better. Make sure you have Shadows turned to OFF and anti aliasing turned to OFF, as well as blooming,.....those can all eat up a lot of FPS. Also play around with Full Screen and Full Screen (Windowed). I'm pretty sure Full Screen without the windowed works better. Using the slider, put your trees and grass to the lowest setting (scroll down on the Graphics section to see this).

When I'm in big raids or BGs my CPU hits about 65% and my memory hits upper 50s percentagewise with a meter I've got running. So I bet your RAM will be quite a bit of help.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I've messed with the graphics settings quite a bit and had it set to all of the lowest setting. As far as the windowed/full screen. Normally I prefer the Full Screen (Windowed) option as it allows for faster ALT-TABing. I tried out the pure Full Screen mode yesterday as I thought that may aid my issue however, in less than 10 mins in Full Screen the game crashed so I went back to Full Screen (Windowed).

I am certainly bottle necked at my 4 gigs of ram right now, the 4 more gigs can't get here soon enough. I just hope it will fit with my CPU fan. I'm really interested to see how the added RAM effects my performance, if I don’t get the desired results I'll be overclocking my CPU.

 

[leaver2000]

My CPU fan.

CORSAIR CAFA70 120mm A70 Dual-Fan CPU Cooler
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181011

 

[leaver2000]

XD Ram showed up DOA! XD

It didnt really fit well with my heat sink either, I had to pull off one of the fans to get it to work. I guess I'll just be upgrading to 2 sticks of 8gig.

 

[catatafish]

If you ever plan on going to 16GB RAM, you may want to consider the Corsair Vengeance low profile sticks. They fit (barely) under my 212 evo cooler.

 

[leaver2000]

If you ever plan on going to 16GB RAM, you may want to consider the Corsair Vengeance low profile sticks. They fit (barely) under my 212 evo cooler.

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I'm probably going to start another forum looking for RAM advice with compatibility for people using P55 / Intel Quad Core set ups along with the clearance needed with an A70 CPU cooler.

 

[Kaltrak]

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I've messed with the graphics settings quite a bit and had it set to all of the lowest setting. As far as the windowed/full screen. Normally I prefer the Full Screen (Windowed) option as it allows for faster ALT-TABing. I tried out the pure Full Screen mode yesterday as I thought that may aid my issue however, in less than 10 mins in Full Screen the game crashed so I went back to Full Screen (Windowed).

I am certainly bottle necked at my 4 gigs of ram right now, the 4 more gigs can't get here soon enough. I just hope it will fit with my CPU fan. I'm really interested to see how the added RAM effects my performance, if I don’t get the desired results I'll be overclocking my CPU.

Be carefull about this game since most of the problems are related to the amount of CPU required to process scenarios with lots of players in it, and not how good/bad your graphic setting is or how fast/slow may your graphic card be. I had a SLI 480GTX running this game with a core 2 duo and my fps droped below 20 on warzones, illum and fleet; changing to a core i7 with the same graphics card made it go over 50 fps in the same zones (and above 120 fps in other places, even with just one card).

You could check if your embedded sound card is having an issue by disabling it (since an on-board audio card uses CPU for it's task and many players doing a lot of casting equals a lot of sound going on... probably you could get choppy sound as well)... and also be aware that Illum currently has some crazy memory leak, because after playing for about 2 o 3 hours there, i had SWTOR using 6Gb of ram... and that's a 32 bit process, so clearly it's not doing it work liberating memory space.

 

[leaver2000]

Be carefull about this game since most of the problems are related to the amount of CPU required to process scenarios with lots of players in it, and not how good/bad your graphic setting is or how fast/slow may your graphic card be. I had a SLI 480GTX running this game with a core 2 duo and my fps droped below 20 on warzones, illum and fleet; changing to a core i7 with the same graphics card made it go over 50 fps in the same zones (and above 120 fps in other places, even with just one card).

You could check if your embedded sound card is having an issue by disabling it (since an on-board audio card uses CPU for it's task and many players doing a lot of casting equals a lot of sound going on... probably you could get choppy sound as well)... and also be aware that Illum currently has some crazy memory leak, because after playing for about 2 o 3 hours there, i had SWTOR using 6Gb of ram... and that's a 32 bit process, so clearly it's not doing it work liberating memory space.

Yesterday me and about 20 republic vs about 40 or so empire I was getting close to 1 FPS. With the Core i7 in the massive PvP scenarios on Ilum are u are not having a major FPS issue?

 

[Kaltrak]

Yesterday me and about 20 republic vs about 40 or so empire I was getting close to 1 FPS. With the Core i7 in the massive PvP scenarios on Ilum are u are not having a major FPS issue?

I think that the most masive PvP action i have seen on Ilum was around 25 vs 30, and yes my FPS went below 30, but over 20... and I am pretty sure it never came below 10. My i7 is running at 4.4Ghz, and I have 8Gb of RAM.

But to the OP; with the core2duo, if you check the GPU usage on Ilum, Warzones and fleet, you will notice that it only has about a 30% load, while the CPU on the other hand is above 80% (that was with a 480GTX). So it actually changing the graphics setup wont help that much, since none of that options (except shadows i think) affects the amount of data that the CPU has to handle.

But as i said, it may be possible to have some sound issue with the drivers, since sound devices embedded in the mainboard often use a bit of CPU to do their work. It would be rare, since normally it's not noticeable... but you can hear as well that sound get's chopped by the game when these high-loads happen (or it could be all the way around, the sound get's cut because of the high CPU but has nothing to do with it).

 

[leaver2000]

I think that the most masive PvP action i have seen on Ilum was around 25 vs 30, and yes my FPS went below 30, but over 20... and I am pretty sure it never came below 10. My i7 is running at 4.4Ghz, and I have 8Gb of RAM.

But to the OP; with the core2duo, if you check the GPU usage on Ilum, Warzones and fleet, you will notice that it only has about a 30% load, while the CPU on the other hand is above 80% (that was with a 480GTX). So it actually changing the graphics setup wont help that much, since none of that options (except shadows i think) affects the amount of data that the CPU has to handle.

But as i said, it may be possible to have some sound issue with the drivers, since sound devices embedded in the mainboard often use a bit of CPU to do their work. It would be rare, since normally it's not noticeable... but you can hear as well that sound get's chopped by the game when these high-loads happen (or it could be all the way around, the sound get's cut because of the high CPU but has nothing to do with it).

Makes sense. I never thought it was my GPU getting bottle necked. I figured my bottleneck was first at the RAM and then CPU. Once I decide on which RAM to choose I'll be looking in overclocking my CPU after I work a few things with my current fan intake setup. Right now I'm running idle at about 40C and maxing out on load at 53C-53C on my CPU.

Good input on the sound, I'll test that later today and your right lowering my graphics really didn’t make much of a difference really.

I've got another forum started up about some possible mounting solutions for 2 more fans in the front of my case to try and get the temps down on my CPU.

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/326826-28-antec-hundred-front-fans

Thanks!

 

[leaver2000]

Best answer selected by leaver2000.