Help resolving bottleneck in SWTOR?

[Rothgard]

Howdy folks,

I'm trying to get more frames out of that new Star Wars mmo.

My system:
Q6850 OC'd to 3.3 Ghz
6 Gigs DDR2 RAM
Asus P5E deluxe mobo
Evga GTX 260

Now, I recently went and bought a GTX 560 Ti and plugged it in. My top end FPS went up about 10%, but I was also able to max out all settings without any drop in FPS. My old config struggled with shadows, which are now no problem for the GTX560 Ti.

I decided to run some GPU and CPU load monitors while playing, and this is what the data looked like:

In isolated areas, or low population areas where interaction with other players is minimal, my fps was easily 50 - 70 FPS. GPU LOAD was often 50%+ sometimes 70%+. CPU LOAD was around 52% as well.

In busy areas, such as the Bank area in the imperial fleet, or in the heat of PVP, GPU load DROPS to about 20 - 30%, and CPU Load remains at about 50% - 55%. My FPS here drops to about 12 - 17 FPS. Almost the same framerate I got with the GTX260. This was the real heartbreaker for me =/

This looks like a bottleneck to me. I started looking at new cpus, and I was thinking about picking up an i5 2500k, 8gigs of corsair ram, and some kinda mobo. I have 2 questions:

Would an upgrade be worth it - is my system actually bottlenecked here, or is something else going on? If an upgrade would bring my GPU load significantly closer to the 100% mark, which motherboard would be the easiest overclocker for the i5 2500k? I'm not overly knowledgeable about overclocking, and something simple and reliable (and cheap!) would be best for me.

 

[signor]

disable Hyperthreading on your CPU, you should notice a decent increase in fps.

 

[signor]

double post, srry.....works network.....

 

[Rothgard]

That sounds like a nice solution, but being a noob to these kinds of things, how do I disable hyperthreading?

Looking at my task manager, I see 4 graphs - and I assume one is for each of the 4 cores in my cpu. I thought that would mean there is no hyperthreading?

 

[signor]

You can if you BIOS lets you, If it does try this
Reboot PC
When It Start's, press F10, Del, Esc or what is it for the BIOS Setup.
Select "Advanced"
Select "Power on Option"
Select "Hyper-Threading"
Change the status from Enable to Disable.
Save changes and exit.

general region for where its located in your bios.

If its only showing 4 graphs in task manager its 1 of 3 things:
1- your using windows XP which will not show virtual cores by default
2- your using windows 7 and your MSconfig isnt set correctly.
3- hyperthreading is disabled

 

[Rothgard]

After looking around I found that the Q6850 does not support hyperthreading, so it should be off by default. My motherboard manufacturer also indicates that the option won't appear in BIOS if the CPU doesn't support it.

Re: SIGNOR -

My cpu is a quad-core, so if I see 4 graphs, wouldn't that be normal? One for each cpu? (I'm not trying to be rude here, I really wouldn't know). I am using windows 7 64bit - that is correct.

So.. that said probably no hyperthreading =/

Any other possible solutions?

 

[signor]

Hmmm always thought the Q6850 has HT, my bad :-(

TBH the CPU is the deffinate bottleneck imo, most mmo's tend to be rather hefty on the CPU.

There can also be other issues but my spider sences say cpu and tbh an upgrade to a 2500k would be a smart move anyhow, if not with this game eventually your cpu will bottleneck a 560.

 

[Rothgard]

That i5 2500k is looking very tempting right now. Which motherboard should I be looking at?

I don't need SLI or any fancy features, but I would really like to have a simple way to overclock it to, say, a stable 4ghz or so.

 

[jwolf24601]

52% cpu usage. Does that mean cores 1&2 are at 100% and 3&4 at 0? if so OC would help

 

[Rothgard]

Each core is running at about 50%

 

[whatsthatnoise]

SWTOR's game engine is just bull.

for example
- some old machines running better than some new ones
- AA enabled improves FPS for most users, disabled AA reduces FPS
- GPU and CPU load is reportedly low on good and even average systems, yet the fps is lower than it could/should be and jumpy
- FPS drop in some zones (warzones ...), running fine in others

etc.

You can try around and spent hours on getting it working for your specific system. Maybe you succeed, maybe not. Or you just wait until Bioware finally fixes this crap.