f13.net

Currently, I'm using i5-750 @ 2.67Ghz, 8GB of RAM, and GTX 460 1GB Superclocked in SLI at 1920x1200 resolution.  All settings maxed.  I've never had any sort of framerate issues.  The game scales with SLI incredibly well, with 50 to 100 percent fps increases - if you can overclock your GPU even 10 percent, you're rewarded with some pretty nice frame rate increases.  Even in PVP warzones, especially Huttball, I've never noticed any sort of graphic lag and I've never seen the framerate monitor (control shift f) drop below 50.  I didn't find that OCing my proc added that much of an increase in frame rate, so I knocked it back down to stock. 

God damn it I am all out of cookies.  :why_so_serious:

I have to say that my 3 year old mid-low range computer runs the game way above expectations.  I'll post my specs when I get home from work, but I'm confident that they are laughable.  I ran SWTOR with most settings at mid and there was no lag.

The game's been in dev. for 5+ years.  They haven't made a whole lot of changes/upgrades to the base engine since then, except really knowing how to add a lot of fluff, polish and shine.  Still uses DX9 at it's core.  So yeah, you don't really need a powerhouse machine to run TOR, but it's nice.

Should be interesting come expansion when they started upgrading the base-tech.

I was able to get 20-24 fps on a Core2 Duo 2.4ghz w/ an nVidia 9800GT card.  I had to turn shadows off entirely to do it, but that's about what I expect from the ol' beast.

The first weekend I played on my old machine C2D 2.4GHz/4GB DDR2 800/GTX 460 1GB. Ran great, except for the last few minutes when everyone went nuts in front of the senate, shooting off aoes and dozens of pcs emoting.

Last weekend I ran my new pc i5 2500K/8GB DDR2 1600/GTX 460 1GB SLI and it was bananas.

Even though I adjust my resolution for overscan on the tv, there is a sliver...and the fps meter was buried enough I couldn't see it. It was red the first weekend and green the second.

Higher end shadows seem to really put a strain on things. I have a E8600 3.33 core2duo and HD4870 and I was in single digits at times--which for these graphics is absolutely absurd. 80+ consistently with the shadows reduced to lowest.

There also seemed to me to be a good number of "it's a beta" issues. Particularly, their instance server was overwhelmed with frequent lag spikes, but also weird framerate drops.

Yeah the game is not exactly a performance hog. I think it did melt Proudft's laptop though.

Yeah, but I think Minesweeper could melt his laptop.

It certainly did overheat it (90C) and force a reboot, putting it in the elite company of Borderlands and the intro screen to Minecraft.

But it ran fine before that.   I didn't get around to putting it on screen, but I'd estimate 60 fps easy inside, dropping to maybe 20-30 in the complicated swamps or canyons with a bunch of dudes running around, and this is a 18-month old laptop (with a real video card).   It was running just a smidge under WoW speed basically once I turned shadows down to little blobs, I was pleasantly surprised.

Early 2011 15" Macbook Pro, 2.3GHz i7 16 Gigs of 1333MHz DDR3, Radeon HD 6750M 1GB, actually ran better on my first gen unibody 15' until I went into the catalyst control panel and told it to let the game do the graphics handling.

Then it ripped shit up and the fans didn't even come on.  :drill:

:ye_gods:

I got a robo call for my stove delivery, which has a 4.5cu ft oven. Robot said "45cu ft" and I couldn't stop giggling. At work, with a full office staring at me. Now, to invite over the neighbor's kids, Hansel and Gretel...

Does the oven play SWTOR too?

His stove is Martha, it's right close by to his tv George.

:drill: :drillf:

Ran the last beta weekend on a 17" i5 2.27ghz Vaio laptop that's a little over a year old now. Native resolution is 1920x1080 so I immediately set SWtOR to that which surprisingly didn't change much in terms of raw FPS. Turning the shadows off did, though. 1gb ATI HD 5650 does not like the fancy shadows. I hear the game has some ATI issues in general though, no surprises there. There were still some stacatto issues that I hope I can get resolved come release but otherwise I got a reasonable frame rate between 20 and 30 with Vsync on. Waaaay too much tearing without.

My old Q9550 OC'd to 3.4ghz is still chugging along. My 5770 is the bottleneck at this point. I want to replace it but this gen has been out for a while and I hate buying a new card for a new gen chipset to literally come out like 1-2 months later. Crossfire eats a dick so I'm not doing that.

I'm probably going to wait and build an entirely new rig when Ivy Bridge drops and hope there's a decent new videocard chipset out from both ATI/Nvidia.

Being a poor SOB I'm still running an 8800 gts and the game ran well enough for me. 

Hey, the 8800 was a goddamn good card. I was bummed when mine finally died.

Yeah it is, I can run even Skyrim with it looking pretty enough.

 :Love_Letters:

I should go chop down the neighbor's cherry tree.

That was a really strong generation, if Rift hadn't killed my 8800GTX, I'd still be using it (in SLI, anyway).

Your television should have a 'just scan' or similar mode (basically no overscan - might be called something different, yet equally goofy) that will let you use native output without having to fiddle with the desktop/game resolution.

Yeah, I purchased a 8800 GTS back in December 2006 and it lasted for almost 4 years, awesome card. I also have fond memories of the ati 800xt (played SWG on it, among other things) and the good old GeForce 3 (very reliable, at least in my experience)

Intel Core i5-750
16GB DDR3-1333
60 GB SSD
ATI Radeon HD 6850

I just put in the upgraded memory (went from 4 to 16) and the new HD in this week.  This weekend was my first run with a SSD.

Suffice to say, the game runs like a dream.  I foresee myself playing/farming/crafting in TOR in between turns of Blood Bowl without any hiccups  :drill: :awesome_for_real:

I have to use the nvidia desktop resize, which unfortunately pincushions at the corners.

Running on my laptop with an i7, 6gb RAM, 2x320gb (RAID) 7200rpm HD, and I think the card is the an ATI Radeon 5870m?  Anyway, this is a monster laptop, so it doesn't struggle too much with SWTOR (it runs Skyrim at Ultra if I turn shadows down to High).  Not as good as I expected, but pretty much all high settings and playable framerates.

My desktop is the i5 2500k, 12gb RAM, vanilla leftover HD, and a GTX 570 card.  Pretty much eats SWTOR alive, but I am having some voltage problems with my PSU that might even be limiting me some.

DLP's do have one downside.

Tom's Hardware do a preformance review on SWTOR (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/star-wars-gaming-tests-review,3087.html?fb_ref=s%3DshowShareBarUI:p%3Dfacebook-like&fb_source=home_multiline#xtor=RSS-993)

Wow. Quad core almost doubles performance. That's a first for me. Maybe it's time to look at an upgrade--when for the first time in years I can't really afford it.

I'm going to grab an SSD today to put my fav. games on.  Leaving the OS off of it for now, but will put a pagefile/cache on there for sure.
I'm assuming a fresh reinstall will be the way to go eh?  There's probably a shared sys folder somewhere that'll get borked...  and as I look, yup.  There's a betatest cache in userappdata.

What's the procedure for just moving the HDD gamefiles over to an SSD w/o a fresh reinstall.  I know it's not as simple as just cut/paste.

Usually the best way to do that sort of thing is to make a copy or rename the original folder, uninstall, do a fresh install, bail out after it starts downloading, move the files into the new folder on the new drive, then finish the install and it won't download files that are already there.

Really? Does this actually work? I honestly never knew you could do something like this... thanks.

Clever girl.

I moved my EQ2 and WoW setups through several different iterations. I got to be a pro. On the other hand, after 4 years, I did a fresh install of EQ2 this fall and it halved my folder size.

My record is arriving home at 4:30 to a bunch of boxes and raiding at 7pm. I also managed to make dinner for my partner and I while the files copied.

The nice thing is swtor doesn't have any registry stuff so you can copy it anywhere.

There is a better way...use directory junctions.

1) Simply move the entire game directory to a new location.

Example: From C:\SWTOR to D:\SWTOR


2) Open a Command Prompt in Windows

How To: Open Windows Startmenu, type 'CMD' into the search box.


3) Create a directory junction pointing to the old location using MKLINK

Syntax: "MKLINK /J "<new location> <old location>"
Example: 'MKLINK /J "D:\SWTOR" "C:\SWTOR"'

More verbose explantion here. (http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1138731)

Especially usefull for Steam, in case you want to have some games on the fast SSD which often isn't large enough to hold the entire Steam folder.

Cala

Net admin for 11 years and didn't know the command. I really really have to get out of the public sector before I forget how to turn on the computer.

Wait.  Windows has symbolic links!?!  I never knew it moved beyond assign.

So, I buy my fancy SSD and asign it to drive G:.
I then copy my D:\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic folder and create/paste to say G:\Games\Star Wars-The Old Republic.
I leave the system files alone (the appdata caches about 1GB on the C: drive).  And windows will THINK swtor is still on D: but passthru to G:?  Thereby maintaining the read/write from the sys files to the G drive?
All this using the /J command instead of /H yes?

Also, if I partition a 2GB pagefile onto my SSD, will that significantly reduce the lifespan of the drive?

I don't know that I'd recommend pagefiles on your SSD, but I haven't looked recently. You can just play with powerboost if you really care about swap speed (basically, convert a $10 4G USB into a 4G high speed page file)

As for links: yes, you want to avoid /H except in very special circumstances.

/J creates wonky processing behavior I'm not sure I entirely get (it's apparently processing it on the server side, and doesn't support remote filesystem links? But I can't find any advantage over just using MKLINK or MKLINK /D and creating symlinks instead of Directory Junctions.)

/H is used when you want to essentially have different files in places, where some files will be the same. For example if I have 3 variants of a patch repository where I can expect 90% of the files to be the same, Hardlinks allow me to save a shitload of space. The primary difference is that if I have FileA hardlinked in DirectoryA and DirectoryB, I can delete it from DirectoryA or B, and it will continue to exist in the other location. It's like a symlink, except neither end is the "real" file. It's simply a file with multiple pointers.

I don't know why I'm getting all "how windows tries to play nice with links" here. I think I was mostly curious since the last time I used NTFS linking it was barely documented or supported yet. Long story short: /J should do the trick per instructions. Not sure why it's not just using /D which seems to be a better /J, but you will not experience any performance difference between the two. Don't use /H, it doesn't do what you think it does. And I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work across volumes.

I would guess that yes, putting a pagefile on your SSD would have a noticeable impact on lifespan.

Yes, you move the entire directory to the new location, but copy works too as the data will simply be deleted once you create the junction/link.

Yes, the link is invisible for application, so no re-installing or changes to registry are needed. Stuff in appdata or savefiles in users/documents stay where they are, although you could move them as well with the same trick, should you wish so.

Yes, do not use /H. I have been using /J (junctions) for ages, but kildorn is right that /D (symbolic link) works too. It's actually the more 'modern' method. Junctions exist since Win 2000, symbolic links since Vista.

Yes, putting the swapfile on the MLC SSD will reduce it's lifespan. It's very hard to find actual numbers on how long these drives really hold, but my personal take on it is that unless you keep your machine for +5 years it will be outdated and replaced long before he SSD starts to fail. Here is an Anandtech article (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4159/ocz-vertex-3-pro-preview-the-first-sf2500-ssd/2) about the subject:

Calapine is correct.  Besides, WTF are you doing putting in a SSD before upgrading your memory to something decent?  Get enough memory, and you don't 'need' a pagefile.

Edit: Also, symbolic links have been in since Vista.

I avoided Vista like the plague, and am fairly new to Win7.  The machines at work have always been XP or earlier for a variety of reasons.

I've got the max ram Vista will resource (im waiting for Win7 for xmas and gave my win7 rig to my brother) and pagefile is a nice trick when you've got multiple physical drives since the mem-managers on vista will use the virt ram on another disk besides the one you're using.  Hence the reason I've got my OS and pagefile on a separate platter from my games.

Also, the SSD addresses an entirely different need with a game like SWTOR; which is why in the forums you're seeing people running out to buy them right now.  With all the cutscenes and dialog, it really helps.  You wont have loadtimes after going into a cutscene, messing up the flow.  You also wont see high-res textures loading, which will happen regardless of how much RAM you have.  Lastly, the game is largely seamless ala WoW and most 4gb systems wont quite have enough to combat stutter during highspeed travel...  SSD helps this again since the pre-cache is more quickly accessed.

Found a nasty crash bug that's locking up my system after a couple hours, setting off the sound card. First time was a white noise at full volume, second was a high pitched beep. My cat's heart won't take many more of those!

5+ years is really optimistic. We're seeing them fail in laptops in under 2 years pretty frequently.

How important is that appdata swapfile on the sys drive anyways?  Should I move that to the ssd and MKLINK also?  Remember, my OS isnt going on my SSD.
Also, it's telling me "cannot create because file already exists."

You can just change the swapfile location.  Go into my control panel, system, then click on the advanced tab, hit the performance tab, the advanced tab, then change the virtual memory settings, you can set where the swapfile is then.

I was talking about the swapfile that Swtor creates in the appdata folder.  Its like 1GB.  I assume it's important.

edit:  swtor seems to use "smart" directories so going through the symbolic link process isnt even necessary.  Just cut-paste.

Hmm, I tried the .ini tweak to enable antialias (at 4): FPS plummeted from 70 to 20-22 in the open "Gnarls" area on Tython. Yeah, still some optimization to add :P. My other settings are all set to max.

Yeah I dont want this on my C: either. I want it on a removable D: drive.
So when I get home and download it tonight I just cut/copy and paste it to the D: drive with no problems?

Changed the valor to "2" and FPS stabilize themselves around 42-48...A more than acceptable tradeoff, visuals are decent enough.

:headscratch:

I'm going to be interested to see what kind of FPS I get if my new rig ever gets here.  /tapfoot.

Fullscreen Exclusive mode can bring some frame rate stability, at it allows your rig to fully focus on the game.  You just can't alt-tab back and forth very quickly.  Even on my rig (Core i5, 16GB RAM, 60GB SSD and a 6850 ATI RadeonHD), the game takes approx. 5-10 seconds when I alt-tab back in for the client to redraw/re-render the environment and actually give me control of my character.  

If you go Windowed or Fullscreen(Windowed) mode, expect some drops.  Right now, if I'm bumming around solo, I run Windowed at a lower resolution (1600x960) so I can still surf the net/get a Blood Bowl game in.  When I do group stuff, I switch it back to Fullscreen Exclusive for the  :drill: and  :awesome_for_real:

I think he meant value.

What did you end up ordering?

Duh.... of course...

Whoops, I was obviously in need of moar coffee when I wrote that  :ye_gods:

/lesson mode -on

In italian, we use the same word to express both "value" and "valor" (or valour) as courage, with the word "valore", so dunno why but I went ahead with that  :oh_i_see:

/lesson mode -off

For those of you with dual ATI cards, are you running with Crossfire on or off? I got a new beast and I'm certainly not getting the performance I expected out of it.

2600k i7 w/ a 570 GTX and 16gb ram (it was on sale)

They were selling a 24" asus for 167 as well, so I got a BIG monitor and will finally have 2 at home.
Full spec
Of course now that it's bought and in QC so I can't cancel the order, my wife loses her job.  Can't win.  :awesome_for_real:

That sounds similar to my setup. 

Asus P8Z68-V Pro
16 GB DDR3 RAM
I-7 2600K
Geforce GTX 570Ti
Corsair HX650w Power supply (7 year warranty!)
WD Black 750GB HD
Crucial 64GB SSD


Put it all in an Antec 900.  I do not care for lights on the case but it was free and it is pretty quiet.  I have Smart Response Technology running for my SSD.  Machine is fast and I am happy.

I have an ATI card and had severe FPS issues with shadows. On highest settings: 30-40 FPS outside, ~ 15 FPS inside buildings. A lot of stuttering.
After turning shadows off, with everything else on the highest: 60-80 FPS inside.

System: Intel Core I7 920, ATI 4870, 6GB RAM

I have an almost identical system setup but have a 2GB ATI 6870. Running with everything maxed in 1900x1200 full screen window with 60Hz vertical sync. Frame rates are usually in the 60-80s outside and over 100 inside -- not that that makes a hell of a lot of difference, really.

Whatever they tweaked in the launch client has made the game look better, but its textures are still pixel-riffic close up. I'm truly spoiled by LOTRO's high-rez textures.

Ack!   :ye_gods:

Sorry to hear it - hopefully it sorts itself out sooner rather than later.

Nice machine, though - I'm shocked at how decent that Apevia case is.