StarWars:The Old Republic

[Nightarchaon]

To anyone playing swtor on any mac, turn off shadows and enable blob shadows , I get 35fps as a low point, with everything else set to max/high on a 2011 iMac @ native res with the 512mb 6770 , system ram and CPU mean next to nothing in this game, it's 90% GPU based, and shadows will kill performance unless your on an SLi / crossfire equipped PC or have the very latest high end top of the line video card, which we mac owners do not have .

 

[Nik73]

Bloom is a major culprit for framerate issues. I recommend turning it off... the visual improvement is minor and isn't worth the tradeoff at the moment. I'm hoping the final build alleviates this problem.

Thanks for that bud, I'll try it later. I messed with the settings, but most didn't seem to do a lot.

To anyone playing swtor on any mac, turn off shadows and enable blob shadows , I get 35fps as a low point, with everything else set to max/high on a 2011 iMac @ native res with the 512mb 6770 , system ram and CPU mean next to nothing in this game, it's 90% GPU based, and shadows will kill performance unless your on an SLi / crossfire equipped PC or have the very latest high end top of the line video card, which we mac owners do not have .

This is one thing I'm not keen on doing as I really like the lighting and shadows. I have knocked it down to about 40% which seems to be the minimum to get nice shadows.


To be honest, I'm really surprised how much of a resource hog this game is for an mmo. It obviously needs better optimisation. Star Trek online was the same on release, but it did take a good while to sort it. Hope it's not the same with this.

 

[cluthz]

SWTOR is the worst resource hog I've seen.
Playing on maxed settings at 1680x1050 it uses 1GB VRAM, and anti aliasing is not enabled yet... This will mean you kinda need 1500MB VRAM to run with high settings with AA on 1680x1050, which is insane for that kind of graphics.

Games like BF3 uses same amount of VRAM on my system, WITH maxed AA.
Skyrim on the other hand, with 4xAA and FXAA, lives happily on 750MB VRAM and looks tons better.

The game does look decent, but I was hoping more from a late 2011 game.
On the other hand, it's very playable at maxed settings, and I do have 40-60 FPS all the time, but I've seen it drop to like 25 FPS some encounters.

The good thing is that I've yet to had any crashes or disconnects in the latests test phase! Lag has been minimal too.

 

[SlickShoes]

SWTOR is the worst resource hog I've seen.
Playing on maxed settings at 1680x1050 it uses 1GB VRAM, and anti aliasing is not enabled yet... This will mean you kinda need 1500MB VRAM to run with high settings with AA on 1680x1050, which is insane for that kind of graphics.

Games like BF3 uses same amount of VRAM on my system, WITH maxed AA.
Skyrim on the other hand, with 4xAA and FXAA, lives happily on 750MB VRAM and looks tons better.

The game does look decent, but I was hoping more from a late 2011 game.
On the other hand, it's very playable at maxed settings, and I do have 40-60 FPS all the time, but I've seen it drop to like 25 FPS some encounters.

The good thing is that I've yet to had any crashes or disconnects in the latests test phase! Lag has been minimal too.

Comparing MMO performance with a single player game is not a great comparison, compare it at least with other MMO's of similar age.

 

[Huntn]

I have the 2011 MBP i7 2.2GHz, Hi-Res, 4GB RAM, and 1GB AMD 6750M. And I'm using the default Boot Camp drivers, which are dated 1/4/2011 (so nothing even close to up-to-date).

Thanks for the info.

Guys I'm flipping back and forth on this game. I am probably going to follow it into retail at this point. Although I understand why, I'm really not liking beta weekends where the queues (300-500) can turn into hours of wait. It's impossible to answer but I'm wondering if this is going to be the norm or if it's just new game excitement? If you have that many people making an evening of the game... I realize once the game hits retail, it will eventually calm down.

 

[MasterTick]

SWTOR is the worst resource hog I've seen.
Playing on maxed settings at 1680x1050 it uses 1GB VRAM, and anti aliasing is not enabled yet... This will mean you kinda need 1500MB VRAM to run with high settings with AA on 1680x1050, which is insane for that kind of graphics.

Games like BF3 uses same amount of VRAM on my system, WITH maxed AA.
Skyrim on the other hand, with 4xAA and FXAA, lives happily on 750MB VRAM and looks tons better.

The game does look decent, but I was hoping more from a late 2011 game.
On the other hand, it's very playable at maxed settings, and I do have 40-60 FPS all the time, but I've seen it drop to like 25 FPS some encounters.

The good thing is that I've yet to had any crashes or disconnects in the latests test phase! Lag has been minimal too.

Turn V-Sync on, after I did this my GPU usage dropped considerably.

Hope this helps.

 

[MichaelVain]

Late 2011 17" MBP ... so i7 2.2, Radeon 6750, 8gb ram...

I have 2 CPUs going to Parallels, 4 gb of ram... Win7 Pro 64bit... and running the game at everything max, with shadows and bloom off... at 1680x1050 and I'm pulling from 30 - 50 fps... occasionally some areas are dipping in the 20s but it hasn't really been noticeable, thats just from the in game read out. The average stays around 35 to 40

I was under the impressions parallels did not support DirectX 10. I'm glad to read that Parallels supports this game. Do you think I could run it on a mid 2010 MBP 17", 8GB Ram, nVidia 330M 512 MB, 2.6 i7?

I'd rather not run boot camp if I don't have to.

Thanks for any info.

 

[cluthz]

Turn V-Sync on, after I did this my GPU usage dropped considerably.

Hope this helps.

I have, seems broken tho, since it doesn't really cap my fps at 60.

I was under the impressions parallels did not support DirectX 10. I'm glad to read that Parallels supports this game. Do you think I could run it on a mid 2010 MBP 17", 8GB Ram, nVidia 330M 512 MB, 2.6 i7?

I'd rather not run boot camp if I don't have to.

Thanks for any info.

Swtor is dx9

 

[MichaelVain]

Swtor is dx9

Thank you.

Do you think I can efficiently (read: it will look good) in parallels with my specs? Mid 2010 MBP 17", i7 2.6, 8GB ram, nvidia 330M 512MB video?

Thank you for any assistance.

 

[Yaboze]

Vsync is sorta broken in SWTOR. Here is a temporary fix.

First, uncheck Windowed mode and Full Screen Exclusion mode, I believe these are for running a full screen windowed mode and the game runs better with these unchecked.

Make sure Vsync is checked. If you launch the game and your FPS is >60, (Control-Shift-F), then uncheck Vsync, Apply, then check it again, then OK. The screen will refresh.

You can do this at the character screen. Once you do that, you will notice your FPS will be properly pinned at 60, giving your GPU fan some much needed rest.

Unfortunately, this has been broken for MONTHS (I am in the beta), so I have to do this each time until they fix it.

 

[Huntn]

Vsync is sorta broken in SWTOR. Here is a temporary fix.

First, uncheck Windowed mode and Full Screen Exclusion mode, I believe these are for running a full screen windowed mode and the game runs better with these unchecked.

Make sure Vsync is checked. If you launch the game and your FPS is >60, (Control-Shift-F), then uncheck Vsync, Apply, then check it again, then OK. The screen will refresh.

You can do this at the character screen. Once you do that, you will notice your FPS will be properly pinned at 60, giving your GPU fan some much needed rest.

Unfortunately, this has been broken for MONTHS (I am in the beta), so I have to do this each time until they fix it.

What does this do for frames, up them or lock them? I don't recall seeing my frame rate over 60. Thanks!

 

[Fynd]

I posted this in the boot camp thread on swtor.com:

Haven't read much through this but I thought I'd give my input based on my weekend experience.

I have a 15" Hi-Res (1680x1050) late 2011 15" Macbook Pro. 2.4ghz i7 quad core, 8GB RAM, 1GB 6770m.

The game ran at high FPS at all times with every setting set to the highest EXCEPT for shadow quality, and I disabled bloom. Those 2 settings cause major issues with this hardware. Bloom alone accounted for, like, a 30 fps difference. Shadow quality is fine until the slider passes the 50% mark, at which point shadows become quite noticeably improved and performance drops rather significantly. Fog, or... well, whatever it would be called, on Coruscant caused significant lag when flying through it on the taxi, but this was the only instance of frame rate drop that I noticed. There's no setting to change the quality/appearance of that fog, though, so it was pretty ugly.

When I say high fps I mean 58-112 fps depending on the area. So quite high, really. This was at native resolution. i tried to get v-sync working so that I could run around with a capped 60fps, but the game's v-sync has issues. It doesn't always work and sometimes required the setting to be disabled/re-enabled several times for it to stick, so I scrapped it after.

For what it's worth, I found the game to be pretty ugly regardless of settings. At launch I'm hoping to be able to run with a working v-sync, and stay 60fps locked with at least SOME form of AA on (this will be key to how the game looks, the aliasing is brutal IMO). Not sure at this point if that will mean lowering any in-game settings by a drastic amount. I found that the settings for each option were fairly subtle, anyway, from low->high, so dropping any of those in exchange for AA will be a no brainer.

:wea_03:

 

[MasterTick]

What does this do for frames, up them or lock them? I don't recall seeing my frame rate over 60. Thanks!

It keeps the FPS the same as your monitors refresh rate (usually 60MHz), that way you don't get any screen tearing.

 

[stellardream]

For what it's worth, I found the game to be pretty ugly regardless of settings. At launch I'm hoping to be able to run with a working v-sync, and stay 60fps locked with at least SOME form of AA on (this will be key to how the game looks, the aliasing is brutal IMO).

I second that, the game is butt ugly. I couldn't even make shadow maps look half descent. They all looked like they were 10x10 pixels. I guess this joke they call UI wasn't helping, because it was bugged.

It makes me wonder how they managed to piss away 100+ million and they didn't even bother hiring a talented team of art designers and couldn't buy a better 3D engine.

But at least they have great voice acting.... Too bad it's not enough to make up for the rest of the mess they made.

I'm pretty disappointed with the state of this game 3 weeks before launch >.<

 

[Huntn]

Regarding the "ugly" critique, I would not go that far. It's not beautiful, but it's not disgusting... My guess is to some degree they want this game to be able to play on a wide spectrum of hardware. Of course I found Wow to be incredible pretty and that was a pretty old engine.

 

[stellardream]

I hear you But the sheer size of the client doesn't support "We want people with $300 netbooks to be able to run our game and give all their money they saved by using food stamps to us". And considering future content additions and expansions, the size of the game might just double what it is right now.

My criticism doesn't actually have anything to do with the number of polygons they push out. I can give a couple of examples where I found things looking just plain odd and crappy.

For example, it's always pretty dark and what not so overall ambience is kind of bluish. When my character talks to another one during a cutscene, I notice something really odd. There's direct yellow light shooting right at the NPC from up above, so the engine ends up mixing yellow and blue. Bad decision. I mean it's color theory basics, saturated yellow and blue don't match well.

There's virtually no ambient light in the game. You can be looking at your character on NPC during a daylight and part of his or her face is going to be almost completely black. Have they ever heard of fill lights or HDRI (However, DX9 doesn't support HDRI, does it?).

Fresnel shader helps a little but sometimes it looks utter ridiculous. Like everything looks like silk or in many situations it just makes colors overblown.

There's no metallic shader on droids. They are all made of cardboard, aren't they?

I can go on and on.

But yellow glow/black core pre-order crystal pretty much solidified my belief that Bioware has some of the worst art directors in the industry. Black isn't light, black is absence of light. The crystal looks cheesy. I removed it from my saber the moment I saw it and deleted it, so it doesn't take up my bag space.

 

[DoghouseMike]

I enjoyed the beta weekend. The only waits I had were Friday, maybe Saturday morning too. It looked quite good on my 2010 MBP with the 320m. I think I dropped the res down to 720, binned the shadows, can't remember the rest of the settings, but it looked decent enough and ran 20-60something fps.
Coruscant sucked. Both as a playing area after the first 10 minutes or so, and the fps were in the lower 20's for most of it, but once I got over to Tarris they were a pretty solid 45+.
I think there's a lot of optimisation to be done still, and you gotta remember there's probably a bunch of diagnostic type stuff going on in the background that won't be in the retail version, so things are bound to improve a bit.

Gameplay wise I was loving it. Mostly playing as a $muggler, it was pretty fun, if not a little too easy a lot of the time, which was a bit annoying as most of it was a cakewalk, and then you'd hit a point that just sucked (the ugly bastard you have to fight just before you get your ship back being the most memorable example). I kicked a Sith in the nuts, talked my way out of trouble while hacking a computer in a separatist base, flirted with every lady at every opportunity and blew a lot of stuff up.
Had a little dabble with the Sith Inquisitor too, they seem fun, and the story looks good, and you get to be nasty to everyone, it's expected of you even.

 

[Alaerian]

<Stuff>

Sorry, but I'd rather Bioware invest their time in making a great game instead of "OMG THE BLUE AND YELLOW IS HORRIBLE" and trying to perfect reflections on droids. Seriously, nitpick much?

 

[mobilehaathi]

So, some of you running it in Parallels 7 + Win7 are actually getting a playable game? That's....tempting...

 

[stellardream]

Sorry, but I'd rather Bioware invest their time in making a great game instead of "OMG THE BLUE AND YELLOW IS HORRIBLE" and trying to perfect reflections on droids. Seriously, nitpick much?

Yes, much. My list of dislikes much longer than that.

They invested their time and money into voice acting and intros and figured after years of hype, they'll just slap this together and maybe nobody's going to notice WAR 2.0 in disguise.

 

[Alaerian]

Good. You won't be playing. One less complainer. Awesome!

 

[Yaboze]

What does this do for frames, up them or lock them? I don't recall seeing my frame rate over 60. Thanks!

Turning off those two things improves the overall graphic performance.

Putting Vsync on and doing that check/uncheck apply trick makes vsync stick for those who are having issues.

It's better to have a near constant 60FPS than to have it at 80-100FPS and then have it drop to 30.

 

[stellardream]

Good. You won't be playing. One less complainer. Awesome!

Nope. I am not a masochist or religiously faithful fanatic. Enjoy pain and suffering of this "epic failure" in the making.

 

[Meicyn]

Nope. I am not a masochist or religiously faithful fanatic. Enjoy pain and suffering of this "epic failure" in the making.

Don't worry, we will. In the meantime, feel free to go away, forever. Make sure to take your melodramatics with you.

 

[VeganHipster]

Anybody play this on the 2011 Mac Mini yet? Intel HD 3000 or AMD, doesn't matter, I am just interested to hear because I plan on picking up a mini soon. The beta played great on my Core 2 Duo and 9600gt so I am hoping it will do well on the mini too.