SWTOR Graphics/FPS question ATI (Pictures in here are high quality 1920x1080)

[Bakinpacman]

First of all i am running a Asus 4870x2 video card which has 2 GPU's on the one card and requires cap profiles to run it so that game like SW:TOR do not run 100% on the first GPU as it essentially turns it into a single GPU card.

I have been messing around with my video cards settings and can play the game perfectly fine with maximum setting forcing in game options on and off and using the CCC to change the same settings. However when i enter caves or enclosed areas my FPS plummets down to 5-20 when it runs at 60-90 in open world.

The first thing i want to find out and how to fix is this however, when at character select screen i get 60-90 fps on all character except for the smuggler with the planet holo image on the bottom left which must be running under some setting that is not correctly set up i guess. So what graphics option causes it to drop suddenly.

Here are the screenshots,
Normal FPS - 62.9


Bad FPS - 22.7


I would appreciate any feedback to enhance my game.

Edited images to thumbnails as they were over the limits for size on our forums. Please read the general posting guidelines prior to attaching images again.

[Mouri Kogorou]

i would say not to expect much from 2 gpus on the same card .. specially if it is ati cards ( i do have 2x 5970 and i have a horrible experience that made me never but ati cards again).

also i can say that your cards are kinda outdated.. i would say that you are having just a normal performance.

[AetherMcLoud]

Try deactivating the shadows (or setting them to low). They are a MAJOR resource hog, especially on ATI cards. Dunno why, but I have to deactivate them on my ATI card, while on my other PC with an (older) nVidia card I can have them activated without problems.

[OhpUldum]

Bloom and shadows are more than likely causing the issues you are seeing.

Make sure you have the latest Catalystm crossfire application profiles downloaded along with the latest iteration of gpu driver. However you may not see an increase in performance until patch 1.2 which has optimized the graphics engine, enough so that the performance increase is noticeable the first time you log on.

[Hellfury]

Bloom and shadows are more than likely causing the issues you are seeing.

Make sure you have the latest Catalystm crossfire application profiles downloaded along with the latest iteration of gpu driver. However you may not see an increase in performance until patch 1.2 which has optimized the graphics engine, enough so that the performance increase is noticeable the first time you log on.

can you give a a source for the optimized graphics engine? Iam on PTS and saw no considerably diference

[Profyrion]

For starters, there's more geometry in the 2nd shot than in the 1st.

And like others have said, bloom & shadows. Shadows especially. For some reason this engine handles them poorly.

And Cula... you could have at least made the resized images link to the bigger ones. It'd be nice to see the detail in this case.

[tenzing21]

(W)hen I enter caves or enclosed areas my FPS plummets down to 5-20 when it runs at 60-90 in open world.

The first thing is, I want to find out how to fix this; however, when at character select screen I get 60-90 fps on all character except for the smuggler with the planet holo image on the bottom left which must be running under some setting that is not correctly set up i guess. So what graphics option causes it to drop suddenly.

The game has these issues built-in, you cannot fix or undo them. The lighting sources in caves causes your CPU (yes CPU, since this game is a DirectX 9 Game, and for some unknown reason, doesn't utilize your GPU(s)) to overload and slow down; out in the open there is only one point of light- the ambient sun, but for some known-only-to-God reason, they put in multiple lighting sources in caves. This game uses fake multi-threading to accomplish the drawing of primitives, the basic thngs you see on the screen. Because it does this, the communication time between the various threads is hundreds sometimes thousands of times slower than just loading it all into your Gddr5 with it's 30+ gig a sec xfer rate. Bio, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to use video cards or cache memory, or pretty much any other modern day tools to run this game

It's unfixable; turn off shadows, turn down your DrawDistance, and update your DirectX files to make sure you have the 9 Redistributable.

Sorry bro.

edit: you have an ATI, what I have been doing is getting to the character select screen, open Ati tray tools, with my over clocking settings set up, and before I load that max profile, I'll manually increase the core speed, accept, tab to game, tab to ATT, manually increase mem speed, accept, tab back to game, then go to ATT a third time, increase Core again 5 more, tab back to Swtor, and my fr are usually around 112 or so. Then I exit the proggy, and use the tray to activate the much higher over-clocked profile.

[OhpUldum]

can you give a a source for the optimized graphics engine? Iam on PTS and saw no considerably diference

My source is the fellow players I am guilded with and people in general plus the two systems I play on.

I patched both of my systems overnight Friday and played on my main desktop Sunday on my day off. My FPS, even with the high res textures enabled, was seeing an average of 20FPS more without consistently dipping as it was before. After discussing this with various people in general on Tython I decided to try out my five year old laptop that couldn't break 20FPS on a good day. With the graphics changes I kept a consistent 30FPS with Vsync enabled while questing, warzones still dipped but I expected that.

I would expect to hear more information regarding the graphics changes as we near live release for the patch.

[markdall]

Try deactivating the shadows (or setting them to low). They are a MAJOR resource hog, especially on ATI cards. Dunno why, but I have to deactivate them on my ATI card, while on my other PC with an (older) nVidia card I can have them activated without problems.

Turning off shadows made it bearable for me too. It was never that good though with my older ATI card, eventually leading me to cancel my subscription.

[Stormrised]

I'm running a single 6850 and had the same issue as you.
Tried messing around with every possible related settings in the CCC and got pretty much no where.

Turned off shadows and bloom.. voila, everything is great.
I'm not sitting at about 45ish FPS in the same places i dropped to 10 FPS before.

[Hellfury]

My source is the fellow players I am guilded with and people in general plus the two systems I play on.

I patched both of my systems overnight Friday and played on my main desktop Sunday on my day off. My FPS, even with the high res textures enabled, was seeing an average of 20FPS more without consistently dipping as it was before. After discussing this with various people in general on Tython I decided to try out my five year old laptop that couldn't break 20FPS on a good day. With the graphics changes I kept a consistent 30FPS with Vsync enabled while questing, warzones still dipped but I expected that.

I would expect to hear more information regarding the graphics changes as we near live release for the patch.

thats most likely the scale down of visibility population on the surrounding they introduced, but thats not a engine change thats just changed how other ppl is drawn

[OhpUldum]

thats most likely the scale down of visibility population on the surrounding they introduced, but thats not a engine change thats just changed how other ppl is drawn

If it works it works, whatever tweaks they want to make that work out positively I say let them.

[Deleted]

The game has these issues built-in, you cannot fix or undo them. The lighting sources in caves causes your CPU (yes CPU, since this game is a DirectX 9 Game, and for some unknown reason, doesn't utilize your GPU(s)) to overload and slow down; out in the open there is only one point of light- the ambient sun, but for some known-only-to-God reason, they put in multiple lighting sources in caves. This game uses fake multi-threading to accomplish the drawing of primitives, the basic thngs you see on the screen. Because it does this, the communication time between the various threads is hundreds sometimes thousands of times slower than just loading it all into your Gddr5 with it's 30+ gig a sec xfer rate. Bio, in their infinite wisdom, decided not to use video cards or cache memory, or pretty much any other modern day tools to run this game

It's unfixable; turn off shadows, turn down your DrawDistance, and update your DirectX files to make sure you have the 9 Redistributable.

Sorry bro.

edit: you have an ATI, what I have been doing is getting to the character select screen, open Ati tray tools, with my over clocking settings set up, and before I load that max profile, I'll manually increase the core speed, accept, tab to game, tab to ATT, manually increase mem speed, accept, tab back to game, then go to ATT a third time, increase Core again 5 more, tab back to Swtor, and my fr are usually around 112 or so. Then I exit the proggy, and use the tray to activate the much higher over-clocked profile.

This!! What the heck have bioware done with this game? Go into a wz everything on high (Shadows and AA off) 20 fps, same wz same place some people on, everything on low (or very low) BAM 20 fps.

Imo you need to a very fast cpu to enjoy this game to the full, else you are screwed.

[Jalek]

Try on the 1.2 PTS, a lot of graphics issues have been fixed.

[Deleted]

Get DirectX 10
The game is not optimized for DirectX 11

[Jalek]

Get DirectX 10
The game is not optimized for DirectX 11

Directx are backward compatable, it just doesn't use all the nice features of 11 but still works.

[Deleted]

Directx are backward compatable, it just doesn't use all the nice features of 11 but still works.

You get about 10-20 FPS more if you use Directx 10