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Hammered306

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Feb 21, 2010
8
0
Currently, I'm playing TOR with my MacBook pro mid 2010 15" with all fine specs except the questionable nvidia 330m graphics card. I am running on windows 7 via boot camp and have upgraded to the latest nvidia drivers. In the nvidis control panel I set all the settings to performance. Also, I have turned all the graphics to low and turned shadows off. I've tampered with the resolutions as well, but nothing seems to change.. Certain areas my game runs just fine, shada nar (sp.) and sometimes in the imperial fleet it's fine, however in most places the lag is quite unbearable.. Especially balmorra. The game often times will freeze from anywhere to 3-8 seconds quite frequently and the rest is all chop. I've been browsing the web and have been seeing people with the same rig saying the game runs fine at low settings with no fps lag. I'm trying to figure out if there is something I can do to resolve this lag problem because I'm digging this game and the lag is ruining it for me.. If anyone has any input on something I can do to tweak this and make it run smoother or any advice at all (besides buying a new computer) please.. Let me know.. Any help would be greatly appreciated.. Thank you!!!!!
 
Oh noob post, but could it be because installed 32 bit windows 7 (64 bit is at school) I have 4 gigs of ram btw
 
64bit windows won't make any difference, the hero engine that they used for the game is 32bit and won't use more than 2gb ram effectively anyway, trust me I'm running on an iMac with 12gb, the thing the extra ram does seem to do is work as a huge cache , which i suppose helps the fact theres only 512mb ram on the video card.

you need to find out if the lag is FPS related, or internet connection/network related, press CTRL+Shift+F and the FPS counter in the bottom left of the screen will show you your current/average FPS.

I would say that with shadows off, bloom off, and FXAA off the 330 should have little problem on the fleet,

the other thing to try is using an external Firewire drive (or USB at a pinch) in case the limitations are due to HDD access of the main drive. I know on my now ancient MBP from early 08 running WoW off an external drive made the game so much swifter.

Try getting a 4GB usb stick and dedicating it to ready boost that could help.
 
Same laptop here, running fine with FXAA (New anti aliasing method)

No shadows ofcourse and textures set on low, between 30 and 110 fps :)



Make sure you get the latest Nvidia Beta drivers
Disable Aero and everything else which might take additional video memory
Overclock the 330M GT because its downclocked by apple. (running at 666/950/1475 now versus stock 450/790/1100 (+30% FPS boost or so)



But you are right about the choppyness sometimes when you change your camera or when you are in a taxi or something, the game tends to freeze/stall for a fraction of a second. Must be game related because more people complain about it.
 
Thank you both for your help, I seem to have gotten it to run a little bit better, however, I am currently updating my drivers to the most recent beta (which I did not have before) and still am experiencing some lag, now in random dungeons believe it or not. As far as overclocking the card goes.. can you point me to a thread or a tutorial that can explain step by step how to do it. I have never overclocked anything before and would like to, without messing up my laptop. Thank you guys again!
 
Thank you both for your help, I seem to have gotten it to run a little bit better, however, I am currently updating my drivers to the most recent beta (which I did not have before) and still am experiencing some lag, now in random dungeons believe it or not. As far as overclocking the card goes.. can you point me to a thread or a tutorial that can explain step by step how to do it. I have never overclocked anything before and would like to, without messing up my laptop. Thank you guys again!

I'm looking in the nvidia control panel right now, and i figured out how to overclock, however, my default setting are graphics clock : 450MHz, Memory clock : 700MHz, and Processor clock : 990MHz.. what ideally should I overclock these to? And if I do switch them, is there anything else I need to worry about or change in order to ensure my laptop will not overheat / die?
 
I also keep getting this error when I try to overclock it a little bit.. 'The changes made were invalid and will not be applied'.
 
You will want to disable powermizer with NVPMManager (google it) and overclock with Nvidia Inspector.

I've solved the choppyness with going from high to low texture setting in the game. When you get over your 256MB of dedicated memory it will begin to use your normal system memory to swap the textures, which will cause some of the lag.

Furthermore, the game actually CAN access up to 4GB on a 64-bit Windows, 3GB for a 32-bit Windows, even if the client is just 32-bit compiled there is a nice flag set for Large Address Aware.


Having that said, on my clean Windows 7 system the memory frequently fills up close to the maximum, and from that point it begins to swap stuff to pagefile and back. I've aleviated the lag by installing 8GB of memory, so there is plenty of memory left for the game and possibly some shared video memory allocation.

FPS is 20 to 100 here, depending on the environment ofcourse. And no more freezes and stalls. Happy :)
 
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