Stuttering - Any solutions?

[Mavecryst]

Hi all, just been wondering about this issue. Last week, I took someone's suggestion of "resetting" the UI preferences by removing its .ini file and then re-doing the settings in-game. This worked like a charm, at first. I was on Tatooine. My fps shot to 55, and things were great. Unfortunately, when I moved planet (now on Alderaan) it became painful to do things at times. I started massive stuttering, sometimes looking like I was teleporting through the landscape.

This issue continues for me on Balmorra on my alt as well. I haven't tested Tatooine again, but I don't see why I should only be able to play there comfortably O.o.

My specs: nVidia 9600m GT (laptop) - 512vram, 4gb Ram, 2.0 ghz dual core. I know, it's not the best laptop in the world now, but it could play the Witcher 2 (albeit on abysmal settings). I can manage WoW on high settings. My settings in SWTOR are low, and strangely, turning AA on low seems to help the stuttering issue.

Please note, this is not an issue with the recent maintenance and patch. I was already having problems on both my Sentinel and Bounty Hunter on Alderaan and Balmorra respectively. I am using low settings in general, and like I mentioned, AA on low not turned off completely.

Could it possibly be a connection issue? I get spikes of high latency every 30-60 mins at times.
Am I getting milder versions of the Taris memory leak? I don't think so, physical memory seems to be stabilised at 75% whenever I check.
Is it something on their side?

Thanks for any help in advance!

[OhpUldum]

Your laptop is similarly spec'd to one of mine. Only difference is I have the 9500 instead of 9600. The settings I use are Blur (Off), AA (Off), Shadows (Off), Depth of Vision/Field (Off), and every other setting low or off when able. I am able to keep a consistent 15 to 20FPS with the rare stutter in a highly populated area. I would suggest you do the same settings for your video. However I would also make sure you are running the most minimum of programs in the background, only what is necessary. Be sure you are virus free, run a program like MalwareBytes' AntiMalware, and be operating Windows 7. At that point, after all those steps, you should have a well optimized system.

[Mavecryst]

Hmm.. I'm running Vista atm, not sure about paying to upgrade to 7, since I may be building a proper PC in a month or two. I also run the same settings as you, with the exception of AA being on low, since that actually helped the stuttering issue to some degree. I'm pretty sure my lappie is virus free as I run a full scan 3-4 times a week, but I'm only using AVG so I'll try the program you suggested. Cheers.

[Kwickslash]

Does it happen straight away or get progressively worse the longer you play? Being a laptop, heat could be an issue.

Have you upgraded your graphics drivers anywhere in between? I heard a few rumors of people getting worse performance after upgrading their drivers with Nvidia.

[Mavecryst]

Does it happen straight away or get progressively worse the longer you play? Being a laptop, heat could be an issue.

Have you upgraded your graphics drivers anywhere in between? I heard a few rumors of people getting worse performance after upgrading their drivers with Nvidia.

I upgraded my drivers shortly after the 20th dec, so I doubt that's it (going back to last week, where I had decent FPS on Tatooine for a few days...) Also, my FPS before that was about 20-25 with no stuttering so it was ironically, more playable.

I contemplated it being a heat issue, but it's still happening when I've just turned on the game and my laptop is still running cool.

---------- Post added 2012-01-25 at 02:42 PM ----------

Not sure if this info will help anyone in finding a solution but.. if i leave the game running for a while, not doing anything, my FPS will go up to 50+ again. If I begin moving around, it stays like that for a short while but then starts stuttering again if for example, I venture about 30s worth of running from the start point. So it seems like the game world seems to be loading in spikes, leading to the stuttering. I've heard a number of things about the poor optimisation for this game, could this be related?

Note: If i stay in one spot, and wait for my FPS to reach that 50+ point, everything else I do is so much smoother, as it was last week for those few days. Opening the inventory, swapping around items and abilities, crew skills window, map, EVERYTHING is better. So at this point I'm assuming it's the slow loading of the game world, for whatever reason.

---------- Post added 2012-01-25 at 10:04 PM ----------

Ok update on this problem. I removed the .ini files again and re did the settings from scratch.

I believe the grass/tree settings need to be turned down to 10% or turned completely off. Turning off AA and vertical sync together seemed to help the most, turning off one without the other, for some strange reason, seems to work against my FPS. Turning both on stabilises the stuttering more, and the FPS, but still results in some stuttering. Both turned off is the best, for now.

Textures do not seem to affect me atm, low or high. The other advanced graphical options like bloom and shadows are of course always turned off as my rig is old to handle that stuff; was always off anyways.

I believe the problem only showed itself on Balmorra because of the clear difference between the flora there compared to Tatooine, so this is in line with the poor optimisation I suspected/slow game world loading. Although I've fixed the stuttering issue for now, I hope more will be done by BW in time to come, as the laptop that is able to play the Witcher 2 with reasonable FPS (~25) should have no problems handling...grass...