Game stuttering with mid-high end PC fix + question.

[Anaeska]

So, correct me if I am wrong. Say I am playing with an - 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz ; I would be better off using one core? i.e., setting affinity to 2? Currently I run @ ultra setting only with shadows on low. Sometimes I get lag which I think is caused to due to processor or graphics, as my latency is just fine <90ms (spells unclickable and character stationary and not moving for a second or two)

What might cause this problem or how to rectify it?

Other useful information : ( 2GB Radeon(TM) HD 6770M GDDR5 Graphics [HDMI, VGA]; 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz & 8GB DDR3 2 Dimm RAM )

[Deleted]

Above PlantDensity = 0 add this line...
FarclipScale = 0.1371195
save that, then make the file-read-only.


Another thing I did was use download Memcleaner- it will automatically remove old pieces of info from system memory periodically.

That seems to work.


What Memory Cleaner do you use btw?

[gatorfan]

A follow up for me. I have an older Core 2 E8400 setup with a NV 560 Ti vid card. I have stuttering only in a few places, the Fleet being one of them. I found my settings file (have to turn on visibility of hidden files/folders btw) and did the following:

BEFORE:
PlantDensity = 69
FarclipScale = 1.

AFTER:
PlantDensity = 0
FarclipScale = 0.1371195

and my stuttering has seemed to go away. I'll try again later when the logged in pop increases and report on repeatability. But this is a good recommendation from my experience so far.

[Karazee]

If it's one of those issues where you're getting great FPS, and then as soon as you enter a new area, your FPS drops immensely, and when you leave the area, it goes back to normal, there's an easy fix for that.

If you are running the game in windowed mode, double click the windows title bar to switch from maximized window to non-maximized window. Then after the reload, do it again to go back to maximized. No more lag. It fixes that particular issue, although I'm not a "computer guy" so I have no idea why.

[Anaeska]

So, correct me if I am wrong. Say I am playing with an - 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz ; I would be better off using one core? i.e., setting affinity to 2? Currently I run @ ultra setting only with shadows on low. Sometimes I get lag which I think is caused to due to processor or graphics, as my latency is just fine <90ms (spells unclickable and character stationary and not moving for a second or two)

What might cause this problem or how to rectify it?

Other useful information : ( 2GB Radeon(TM) HD 6770M GDDR5 Graphics [HDMI, VGA]; 2nd generation Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2670QM (2.2 GHz, 6MB L3 Cache) with Turbo Boost up to 3.1 GHz & 8GB DDR3 2 Dimm RAM )

Perhaps some light on this please.. if you could fellas.

TY

[Sumatran]

A follow up for me. I have an older Core 2 E8400 setup with a NV 560 Ti vid card. I have stuttering only in a few places, the Fleet being one of them. I found my settings file (have to turn on visibility of hidden files/folders btw) and did the following:

BEFORE:
PlantDensity = 69
FarclipScale = 1.

AFTER:
PlantDensity = 0
FarclipScale = 0.1371195

and my stuttering has seemed to go away. I'll try again later when the logged in pop increases and report on repeatability. But this is a good recommendation from my experience so far.

Does this have any negative effects to gameplay? Ie large popups or anything?

[Deleted]

Perhaps some light on this please.. if you could fellas.

TY

Try running on one core and noting down the results. Other than that, i dunno. Mine seems better on one core. It also seems better with the farclip trick.


Im super fussy with stutter in games, what i experience im sure wouldnt bother many people, but i have a keen eye for detail.

If i get stutter even every 10 minutes, i wont subscribe to this game at all.


Im not subscribing to a game that isnt optimised.

---------- Post added 2012-01-03 at 07:30 PM ----------

Does this have any negative effects to gameplay? Ie large popups or anything?

I didnt notice any difference to popups. The game looks exaclty the same for me.

[Tore]

Are you using SLI/Crossfire? Microstutter (meaning stuttery video without drops in FPS) is a common glitch of dual-GPU setups. Oddly it only happens when using an even number of GPUs so 3x SLI doesn't experience the same bugs.

[Deleted]

After looking for "memcleaner" and not getting a response from the guy to see which one he uses, i went ahead and installed Advanced SystemCare Free 5.

I did a deep scan cleanse thing and let it go through all including a registry defrag (even though i have a SSD).

I did not choose a complete disk defrag, just the registry, because as most know by now this is very bad for SSD's.


I can honestly say the game runs 100% smooth now. No stutters at all.


Guess my fresh installation of Windows 7 i did 2 days ago wasnt particularly fresh after all.


If anyone else tries this, let me know how you get on with it. Im keeping this program seems to be very good. And no this is not an advert to it, just something i found and wanted to share with people.

[Hellfury]

Me I dont mind lower FPS, but on swtor its making me crazy FPS sitting at 40-70fps but game stutering like crazy.

And btw anyone tryed it on Windows8 beta?

---------- Post added 2012-01-03 at 10:08 PM ----------

I believe it will work better with a powerful dual core because the game doesnt seem very optimised to run on any more cores.

Heres my findings - (I have an Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2410M Laptop processor btw @ 3ghz)

1. Both swtor.exe processes running on all 4 cores = High FPS but the game "chops" in certain places, normally large open areas.
2. Both swtor.exe processes running on Core 0 only = High FPS and very smooth gameplay
3. One swtor.exe running on core 0, the other on core 1 = High FPS but the game "chops" in certain places, normally large open areas.
4. One swtor.exe running on core 0, the other on core 2 = High FPS and very smooth gameplay, but sound stutter
5. One swtor.exe running on core 0, the other on core 3 = High FPS and very smooth gameplay, but sound stutter
6. Both swtor.exe processes running on Core 3 only = High FPS and very smooth gameplay

I have a C2Q 9450 at 3ghz and making it run on only 1 core made it worst for me actualy, had high hopes this would make stutering go away for me.

[Bootyclap]

Found this little gem on the TOR forums, change the compatibility mode to windows XP SP3, I went from stuttering in IF with shadows off to running smooth with 300 people with shadows on. Hope it works for you guys.

[FlawlessSoul]

Found this little gem on the TOR forums, change the compatibility mode to windows XP SP3, I went from stuttering in IF with shadows off to running smooth with 300 people with shadows on. Hope it works for you guys.

Can you elaborate and offer a source link?

[-aiko-]

Found this little gem on the TOR forums, change the compatibility mode to windows XP SP3, I went from stuttering in IF with shadows off to running smooth with 300 people with shadows on. Hope it works for you guys.

This appears to crash the game. Curiously, I tried other compatibility modes and came across the same issue.

[Bootyclap]

Can you elaborate and offer a source link?

There are literally thousands of posts on the CS forum on www.swtor.com concerning FPS issues.

Found it in one of them, also just did an Battle for Alderaan that was completely lag free. Needless to say, this "fix" worked for me and if you guys care to give it a go it may help you too.

Edit: Some folks do report crashing, the only thing I can say is it seems to have helped me.

[Deleted]

I tried the farclip setting, i tried the Win XP SP 3 setting and they seem to have helped with choppy gameplay.


But I really have issues with the camera. It just seems slow and unresponsive.


Its like the game has a massive amount of mouse smoothing on it (a feature that i hate), and the damned auto center of the camera i just cant get used to.


Think ill get to 50 and unsubscribe, i so want to enjoy this game, but these minor glitches with no options for user preference is really starting to bug me out.

I really cant understand why EA/Bioware would make an effort to actually omit these options for players. It beggers belief.

[FlawlessSoul]

There are literally thousands of posts on the CS forum on www.swtor.com concerning FPS issues.

Found it in one of them, also just did an Battle for Alderaan that was completely lag free. Needless to say, this "fix" worked for me and if you guys care to give it a go it may help you too.

Edit: Some folks do report crashing, the only thing I can say is it seems to have helped me.

You're right, there are thousands of posts which is why I was asking for a source. Can you take a look through your history to find it? I'd like to find out the method they've used. Perhaps they were suffering a different problem to others, which this has resolved for them, since I've not seen any benefit for using XP SP3 mode on launcher/swtor executables (nor, for that matter, have I seen any benefit when limiting SWTOR to single cores. In fact, the opposite - doing so has halved framerates and introduced stutters that would make a linguistics therapist cringe. Normally, I get minor hiccups reminiscent of SLI stutters (without SLI) and generally shite performance with shadows).

[Hellfury]

A follow up for me. I have an older Core 2 E8400 setup with a NV 560 Ti vid card. I have stuttering only in a few places, the Fleet being one of them. I found my settings file (have to turn on visibility of hidden files/folders btw) and did the following:

BEFORE:
PlantDensity = 69
FarclipScale = 1.

AFTER:
PlantDensity = 0
FarclipScale = 0.1371195

and my stuttering has seemed to go away. I'll try again later when the logged in pop increases and report on repeatability. But this is a good recommendation from my experience so far.

THis does affect visuals, it makes draw distance shorter, its pretty significant on open planets, not so much on "corridor" planets like Coroscant and Nar Shadan

[Deleted]

I have exactly the same issue as the OP. Using a Mobile i5 520M 2.4Ghz (Goes to 2.66Ghz mostly) combined with an Nvidia 330M GT (Overclocked)

Observing 'stuttering' especially when moving my camera, attacking mobs or/and especially on taxi drives or my Speeder.
Also observing both CPU and GPU usage drops when these stalls happen.


And indeed putting the affinity for both swtor.exe's on only using my 1st core (with the hyperthreading core) the game runs much smoother and I do not notice such weird stalls anymore. Take into account that with doing this it might even take more advantage of Turboboost if it has a cpu spike or something. (At least I notice it was used much more with CPU-Z and putting both the swtor.exe's on my 1st CPU only, while putting them both on my second core (3 and 4) didn't trigger the Turbo boost that much. (So running at 1st core will put it to 2.9GHz alot of times)

I'm still confused that no matter what you try the CPU is hardly utilized in this game at all. (Doesnt matter whether the graphics settings are high or low, shadows on or off)


Messing around with the priority of the threads will indeed introduce audio stuttering/garbage and I cant even stop that with turning the priorities back to normal. (Have to restart the whole game lol)

Having 8GB of memory as well and even disabled my pagefile because it also seemed to be swapping to pagefile constantly for some weird reason. (it was not temporary but just constantly with around 400kB/s. Pretty sure it was because of TOR.

I guess problems solved.

[Decan]

Try this to unpark your CPU cores

- go to REGEDIT
- Search and Find this key [ 54533251-82be-4824-96c1-47b60b740d00 ] without the " [ ] "
- alternately, you can search and find the phrase " Core Parking " - again without the " "
- either of the above searchs works and delivers the exact same results
- delete the key(s)
- make sure you search the whole Registry - you should find it [ from memory ] 6 times but will only be able to delete [ from memory ] the first 2 or 3 instances - dont worry about the ones you cant delete - just delete all the ones you can
- exit the Registy
- Shutdown Win7
- Do a full cold shutdown and re-boot

Perfect* load balancing across all you CPU cores - no spiking - both in Windows 7 Task Manager and Sonars CPU meters

This program will also do it for you
http://www.coderbag.com/Programming-...arking-Utility


Hope the above is of help.

[justinram22]

Found an odd fix.

Download the program Dxtroy
http://dxtory.com/v2-download-en.html

Go to the advanced tab, and limit your fps to what you usually get.
Works like a charm (For if your fps is fine, but still "stutters")