So for some reason, my rig can't run 60fps when terrain settings are maxed and I'm outdoors. I have an rx 580 with an i7 4790. Is this the best we can hope for or is there way around it?
I used the guides available out there to run the game with 2GB, but I read that that is the highest it goes.
Posted Oct 20, 2018, 4:31 PM UTC
The development of the game began about 20 years ago. It is not using modern game engine techniques. It has to do all of this in one thread. The moment any one of those things has to wait, everything has to wait. That's where your stutters are coming from.
It gets particularly bad when the terrain has to be recalculated. And that happens every time you come across a spawn or a building in the wild. It's not like modern games that pre-calculate the terrain and have foreknowledge of where everything is. SWG does things on the fly, procedurally, and that's what makes it possible to have a 2800 square kilometer game world. But it also makes it hard to optimize the scene using things like occlusion culling and level-of-detail management. Modern games get a lot of their performance by managing those things really aggressively and intelligently. And they do a lot of that on the GPU while SWG does all of it on the CPU.
The volumetric shadows implementation is broken and will also cause stutters. That might be related to the procedural-ness too. The game has to figure out what casts a shadow, and while it's doing that, the geometry of the scene changes. That can result in weird artifacted shadows and stutters.
The next problem is the radial flora. It wasn't really until DirectX 10 that we could tell a graphics card to draw the same thing 1000 times at once. That batching of rendering doesn't happen in SWG. It draws all of those wavy plants one by one. And they have to wait for the terrain geometry before they know where they can be drawn. And we already know the terrain geometry is problematical. And not all flora is equal. Plants on Naboo will tank your FPS more than on Yavin.
SWG requires high single-core performance. Optimize your PC around that. Learn to live without the volumetric shadows. Be aware that some locations are always going to be FPS killers and some others less so.
Curiously, some of the third-party planets like Chandrila and Tanaab have much better performance than the originals. I'm assuming it's because of some different combination of terrain and flora 'cost'. Or maybe more thought was applied to the assets and how they're drawn.
Someone else mentioned the settings overrider tool. There is an updated version of that here : https://modthegalaxy.com/index.php?resources/swg-galaxy-extender.8/ I bet you will be surprised how much more detail you can get into your 60 FPS budget and how much your FPS will tank when you reach the single-thread limit of your CPU. You can make the game run at 1 FPS if you tell it to draw enough flora.
The thing is, flora and shadows doesn't kill my fps. I can turn them off and nothing will change. The only thing that ever lowers my fps is turning up the "high detail range" slider under terrain.
Turn off external shadows and make sure you have latest graphic drivers.
First thing I tried. Makes no difference.
Try messing with the terrain detail and range sliders
my rig can't run 60fps when terrain settings are maxed
Please read my OP fully.
This game is 10 years old. There's no reason my hardware wouldn't be able to max it.
This game is 10 years old. There's no reason my hardware wouldn't be able to max it.
This game is 10 years old and your hardware is optimized for a completely different approach to game graphics. Just something to be mindful of.
That said I can run the Pre-CU client at 60fps with above max settings (machineoptions edit) on a 3570k and a RX580 8GB.
It has nothing to do with your rig lol.
Just because the game is old doesn't mean it should run flawlessly. Especially for an emulation of a game that had FPS issues when it was live.
Which version of SWG are you running?
Here's the thing: Raph Koster mentioned that when the game was made, some settings were designed to improve with newer computers. I would say get an updated texture pack for more detail, but not mich else is required for the game to look decent.
Try playing the game in a lower resolution
This may be a shot in the dark, but do you have any items in your toolbar? I recall having serious FPS drops when I had anything in my toolbar that wasn't just an icon.