swtor crashing suddenly

[katrassidy]

Hello,
My game is crashing after I am in my character world. It happens immediately if I open something like the map or settings, or even hover over the minimap, and happens after a few minutes of game play regardless. I called the help line and they had me manually reset my settings (details below [Renderer]) and suggested I updated the video card. I can’t even find a driver for the video card, but it says it’s the version from 1/2015 anyway. Here are my comp specs and game details:
Dell 64 bit windows 10
Intel® Core™ i7-4500U CPU 1.80GHz 2.4 GHz
8 GB Ram; Intel® HD Graphics Family 400

[Renderer]
AllowColorRemapping = true
AllowDepthOfField = true
AmbientNPCCount = 35
D3DFullScreen = true
doBlobShadows = true
doShadows = true
EnableBloom = true
GraphicsDeviceId = 2582
GraphicsQuality = 3
Height = 768
NativeHeight = 768
NativeWidth = 1366
PerfTestFlags = 442258
PlantDensity = 100
RefreshRate = 60
ShaderSet = 9
SpeedTreeDistanceScale = 1.25
TextureAnisotropy = 16
TextureQuality = 0
VerticalSyncState = true
Width = 1366
WindowX = 0
WindowY = 31
CodeVersionChanged = false
LastCodeVersionRun = 1
AntiAliasingLevel = 2
GammaRamp = 1.
MeshLODQuality = 1
AtlasQuality = 1
ShadowMapResolution = 1024
DYDDrawDistancePreset = 1
FullScreen = false


[Game]
MoviesFolder = ..\..\Movies
SwtorRegKey = SOFTWARE\BioWare\Star Wars - The Old Republic

[TirielWoW]

Your card basically shouldn't be able to run the game anyway. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even have enough onboard memory to properly run the game. It's not meant for graphics intensive games.

That said, you might be able to get it to work if you turn your graphics all the way down. Try everything on the lowest possible settings and see if that fixes the issue.

[katrassidy]

Your card basically shouldn't be able to run the game anyway. As far as I can tell, it doesn't even have enough onboard memory to properly run the game. It's not meant for graphics intensive games.

That said, you might be able to get it to work if you turn your graphics all the way down. Try everything on the lowest possible settings and see if that fixes the issue.

Really!? I have been playing on this computer for two years without any issues

- - - Updated - - -

Nope that didn't work. As far as I can seem to tell the graphics card has the most recent driver as well. Makes no sense.

[quras]

I've got to go with HeatherRea on this one.

You have 2 problem areas that I see.

SWTOR is very CPU heavy. Your processor is right on the edge but can push 2.4 in turbo when needed but barely over minimum requirements. The "U" for that processor means it's a low voltage version so it's got a bit lower performance but better battery life. Meaning, I have to assume you're running on a laptop and unless you bought a rather expensive laptop, it's not made to game no matter how much RAM they cram in it.. While good for general tasks, it's not great for gaming. This could be causing some issues with SWTOR as they tweak SWTOR on the back side and nothing a driver would fix.

What I think it is, is your video card. Updates to the game taking it's toll on what your limited card card can do.
If I'm not mistaken, your card is very similar to a 7600GT. Thats 2 generations below the minimum requirement for a rough comparison as well as on board graphics never being all that great for gaming anyway.

That doesn't mean it won't run SWTOR, it just wouldn't have ever ran it really well. As they continue to upgrade SWTOR and itemize it for better performance, there is no doubt you would start to see more and more problems on the graphics end no matter what driver you use.

I think you have more of a problem with your hardware (video card) getting out of date than the software. Your CPU might also be a bit of a hindrance as well.

You may be in need of some hardware upgrades as BW continues to tweak things.

If all else fails and I know it's a headache. Maybe something happened during patching. If you really wanted to play. I'd uninstall everything SWTOR related. All files, all folders. Uninstall and delete it all.

Do a full, clean install and start off with all settings at the minimum or OFF. Adjust from there if it will run at all.

[katrassidy]

Thanks guys. I need a new computer.

[palswim]

I had a similar experience recently and thought that this might be as good a place as any to relate it.

Right after I installed the most recent patch (4.0.4), I noticed that SW-TOR would crash when I attempted to travel to a large planet (e.g. Tatooine, Hoth). When I traveled to Coruscant or the Fleet, the game would not crash. I had thought that quick travel or Heroic Transports would cause the crash, but I discovered that the game would crash even if I exited my ship on a particular planet. When the game would crash, it would show no warning, no alert box, no log entry, and do no cleanup of the User cache files ("DiskCacheStatic" and "DiskCacheStream" in "%LOCALAPPDATA%\SWTOR\swtor\").

Obviously, the game was having trouble loading the larger planets. So, I began to investigate what had changed and why my machine was crashing. I scoured the patch notes to find any mention of a graphics or resource change, but found nothing. I began to search on my video card and issues people were having with the game. At this point, I had a fair degree of certainty that my video card no longer sufficed to run the game.

Strangely, I had another machine, which I had always considered lower-powered than the PC giving me the problems. This machine ran SW-TOR just fine and loaded all of the planets without issue.

At various points throughout this troubleshooting process, I had considered creating forum posts, here and elsewhere. Now, I'm glad I didn't.

After a couple of days, I was doing an unrelated activity, just browsing the web and attempted to download a file. But, the download kept failing, and so I investigated further. Then, finally I realized that the disk to which I was trying to download the file, the same disk which held the User cache files had no space left! SW-TOR was attempting to allocate space for expanding the User cache files, but would crash upon failure.

I cleared space on the disk, and lo and behold, SW-TOR ran and loaded Tatooine and Hoth and every other planet just fine!

In short, with troubleshooting, I always have to have a high degree of suspicion on myself first before I turn outward.

Other notes of relevance:

• I configured my system so that SW-TOR's cache files resided on a RAM Disk. The RAM Disk has always run flawlessly for me, but has significantly less space than a hard disk, so I can run out of space without realizing it easily.

[Deleted]

Lol, i have other issue. My system crashes whenever i try to exit the game through menu, so I have to quit manually through task manager to avoid that :P

[lkshis]

OP, you can get some technical help at Windows Seven forum (if you run Win7). The techs will help determine whether it is a software (driver) or hardware issue. The folks are friendly, though unfortunately for me, it was a hardware issue and I had to replace my inadequate and dying graphics card.