Help me, cubicle geeks

[Veela]

EDIT: Issue seems to be fixed... though I'm certainly confused as to the "why" of it. See later posts for details.

Original issue behind spoiler tag:

Spoiler:

I'm just gonna repost what I posted on the official forums:

My husband bought a PC this year in anticipation of SWTOR. Basic specs:

Intel Core i7 3ghz
NVIDIA 9400GT
8 GB RAM
64-bit Windows 7

I, on the other hand, have been running on a 4-year-old rig that I'm lazy about upgrading:

Core Duo 2.66ghz
NVIDIA 8800 GTS
4GB RAM
64-bit Windows 7

We both played in the beta, and his rig was able to run flawlessly at medium settings. He was able to run some settings at high, but chose to run them at medium in order to get better FPS. I had some lag issues early on, but the last couple of beta builds really optimized for me and smoothed out a lot of my issues.

Yesterday, we were both accepted into Early Access. Yay!

BUT WAIT.

My computer is running easily at 50fps. His is completely, unbearably choppy. It's unplayable.


So what's a girl to do? Well, I got to work on troubleshooting. Here's what I've done so far:

• Ran msconfig to shut down anything stupid running at startup (i.e., iTunes and MS Office, etc)
  Updated all drivers (or checked at least. Everything was up to date)
  Set all settings to "Low"
  Ran CCleaner to make sure any registry errors were cleaned up
  Ran MBAM and Spybot, just in case Jimi's been fapping to infected pr0n (he wasn't)
  Shut off shadows
  Took the steps listed earlier in this thread (disabling AA, antisotropic filters, etc)
  Ran a clean install of the game as of late last night

I'm not exactly computer illiterate, I know my way around, and I'll tell you what, this left me scratching my head. What the heck else is there to do? Today I'm trying a rollback of his driver (though I'm playing on the SAME driver on my older PC without an issue), and attempting to seek help from other brains who might have other ideas... namely, you guys.

Any ideas on this? I'm stumped. Especially considering my game runs smooth like butter, and is about half the machine his is. And it ran the game perfectly fine not a WEEK ago in beta!

[Blackferne]

I will be curious to find out what it is.

How is the driver roll back going?

[Lonomonkey]

hey! I'm one of those cubicle geeks and there's a few things that comes to mind. I want to start out by saying that with the rig your husband have he should be fine so it's not a case of crappy PC. I'm pretty sure it's a memory problem but the cause of said problem can be hard to pinpoint.I'll go with a question/answer type thing.

Are you noticing poor perfomance in other games and/or when using web programs?? Especially, is the PC especially slow to boot up? If you open up the task manager and monitor memory usage do you notice huge spikes?

If so then there's probably a program running that's using up all the memory. It could very well be some sort of virus of simply a shitty program that's leaking memory. Task manager is really your best friend here. If you can pinpoint the culprit then you can get rid of it easily, if not, start thinking along the virus line.

Are you having unexplained crashes? Error reports or just plain weird behavior out of nowhere?

If task manager seems fine but you're still having slowdowns/crashes it could be indicative of a defective/dying hard drive.

Finaly, if the slowness is really only happening with swtor and nothing else, it could be a bad install.

[Bulwark]

if taskmanager shows nothing taking up your resources, try swapping the video cards. He may have a skunked card.

[Jimer Lins]

Has anything been added or modified on his system recently before the performance issues came up?

[Veela]

- Nothing's been modified
- Other games like EVE run just fine on high settings
- We did a fresh install this AM and no dice

Lono, specifically to answer your Q's, no performance issues elsewhere, PC boots fast (after I cleaned up msconfig last night), and I can't seem to pinpoint anything in Task Manager that's pulling memory. I'll check again, just in case.

I'm rolling back the drivers as I type this. Pain in the ASS, that is.

[Sir Psyko]

This launch reset ALL the settings in the game (annoyed the hell out of me since I spent 6 months getting them all "just right" ). Go back through and see if everything is set right.

There's issues with the 285.64 (I think that's the right number) nVidia drivers (the drivers would crash Firefox... Firefox! so I uninstalled clean and reinstalled). I'm using the 27x.xx now again.

Grab SpeedFan and monitor the GPU temps. The fan might be dying and the card overheating.

MemTest86+ the RAM overnight or while at work... a stick might have developed an error.

[Veela]

SirP, how can I tell if something is too hot?

Here's the list of temps:

GPU: 55C
Local Temp: -56C
Remote Temp: 72C
Temp1: 38C
Temp 2: 97C
Temp 3: 48C
HD0: 39C
Core 0: 53C
Core 1: 50C

I don't know what any of that means, or how to fix it if it's bad.

[Veela]

I don't even---

The HELL?

Saw someone post a link to something, and I tried it. Totally worked. The "solution"?

Turn all settings to "High" and shut off shadows.



/boggle

[Blackferne]

I don't even---

The HELL?

Saw someone post a link to something, and I tried it. Totally worked. The "solution"?

Turn all settings to "High" and shut off shadows.



/boggle

I'm sorry Jimmy, you just have.to play in awesome mode.

Sent from Nar Shadaa using Tapanudo.

[Sir Psyko]

SirP, how can I tell if something is too hot?

Here's the list of temps:

GPU: 55C
Local Temp: -56C
Remote Temp: 72C
Temp1: 38C
Temp 2: 97C
Temp 3: 48C
HD0: 39C
Core 0: 53C
Core 1: 50C

I don't know what any of that means, or how to fix it if it's bad.

The only thing I'm seeing of concern is the Temp 2 reading of 97C. Not sure if that's a phantom reading of the chipset... but the rest of the stuff looks fine. What kind of Motherboard is it? I'll see if I can dig some more info up about it.

[Dashl]

[quote="Veela"]I don't even---

The HELL?

Saw someone post a link to something, and I tried it. Totally worked. The "solution"?

Turn all settings to "High" and shut off shadows.



/boggle

A lot of people in general chat yesterday were talking about turning off shadows to fix problems.

[Sir Psyko]

There is a memory leak... I watched it gradually consume an additional 1.1GB of RAM and then turn into a slideshow whenever I was in a building... walk outside and it was fine. Had to restart the client. This is the first I've run into it, so it's a new bug.

[Dood]

There is a memory leak... I watched it gradually consume an additional 1.1GB of RAM and then turn into a slideshow whenever I was in a building... walk outside and it was fine. Had to restart the client. This is the first I've run into it, so it's a new bug.

I've seen it a few times in beta - even reported it. Walk into buildings and suddenly I was chunking harder than a pumpkin fired from a cannon. Also have watched as my memory usage goes from 75% to 99% the longer I play. Annoying.