Alienware M15x SWTOR - General Discussion

Not quite sure if a thread already exists regarding SWTOR, if it does feel free to close it down.

Played the Beta Weekend's of SWTOR and just finished playing my first day of early access.

I'm currently playing on low with my character details on high, and my terrain details on medium. This allows me to get somewhat of 60 frames in solo play and a bearable experience in main hubs and a decent PvP one. The greatest fps gain comes to me from disabling anything regarding the shaders and bloom effects.

Would just like to see some feedback from anyone else currently playing SWTOR on the M15x, what drivers their using, ect.

 

What drivers are you on? Did you oc the 5850, i ask only because those settings seem low for that card.

 

no, i couldnt agree more currently running whatever dell has on their site for the 5850, and haven't oc'd or really messed around due to the crazy que times

 

The dell drivers are quite old if I'm not mistaken. Personally I felt the 11.7 drivers were perfect, tried out the 12.1, but not really overly impressed.

 

Didn't take the time to look for the 11.7, but gave the 11.12 drivers a go, ran with standard clocks but there was no real change, I guessing its the same problems i've had since I got the system...

 

I get decent fps with some stuttering in congested spots or major urban sites. I play on medium settings with much the same settings as you but my distances are up pretty high. At high i was experiencing just a tad more fps drop but i lowered the settings since i knew i was going to be playing this game ALL THE DAMN DAY.

 

I'm having a lot of trouble with it, my 240m card is showing it's age for sure.
I did a fresh install and only have swotor running and can't get more than 24 fps anywhere.
Going into the warzones drops me to 14 and pretty much makes the game unplayable.
I turned everything off, and no luck.

I have the i5 processor and 4 gigs of ram, other games run fine but swotor just beats this machine up

I thought of upgrading, but I think I'll just save for a new laptop.

 

i feel the same way, only thing is I felt my M15x should of been able to at least handle low settings...

 

Blitz, I have the same M15x config as you. Try to disable shadow detail, just turn them off completely, that will help your fps.

I agree for some reason swtor eats the m15x for breakfast. I used to play wow and had 60+ fps on ultra settings, so weird swtor demands so much. Although the beta ran more smooth for me.

 

could be graphics card driver optimization or bioware who knows. Just wait and see if new nvidia/AMD drivers or a bioware patch comes out soon to increase performance.

 

In the customer support forums on swotor, a thread was started about swotor's hero engine not using multiple cores as well, apparently the engine puts a lot of stress on the cpu...

 

i start play this game this week, using the old GTX260M on my M15X, and 5870HD on MSI,

Nvidia Driver ver 90.36 on 260M
and 12.1 on 5870

the GTX260M clocked to 640Mhz/1000Mhz/1600Mhz while the 5870 on stock

on MSI with most of setting High on 1920 x 1080, the FPS is arround 60 average, something feel a bit lag..., but since all in high setting, so i consider it normal

while on M15X with Low setting on 1600 x 1050 (yeah i just down want push the old card ;p ) the FPS average is arround 81 fps...

so far not bad, only 1 crash related to graphic driver on M15x...

oh, this game also sometimes got issue with quadcore processor, so they suggest to set affinity to 2 core only on task manager...

but i found setting windows boot to specific amount of core is fix this issue for me. also fix stuttering issue.

u can set it on MSCONFIG --> Boot Tab --> Number of Cores (2 for dual core and 4 for quad)

 

I had some FPS issues with SWTOR so i logged it on GPU-Z.

UNmazing.

My clocks lower to 202.5,162.0, 405 for EXACTLY 13 SECONDS then return to stock clocks 675/625/1350

These events occur periodically, but always last for 13SECONDS. I recorded 20 events all with the same clock values, voltage drops to .825 from .95 also - all 20 drops were 13 seconds.

is that about!?

 

u sure u not in stealth mode?

 

no I am not in stealth mode

 

Have you applied the dell vbios update? Apparently it fixes the lower clock settings to standard, and the throttling issues some people faced. I say apparently as I don't have that card, nor do I have any experience with it.

 

update on my experience with SWTOR, flashpoints and pvp are alright on low settings if too much action isn't taking place. While leveling through my low 20's on Nar'Shadda I had a steady 30 fps if not lower due to the surrounding terrain on the planet...

 

I am not sure what the dell vbios is.... i've update to the latest bios version if thats what you mean..

currently running bios version A09

 

vBIOS is the graphics card's (video card's) BIOS.
This one:

GTX 460M Dell vBIOS

 

Can anyone tell me what the "r2" stands for?

 

r2??? in reference to what?
you mean like m17x r2? this mean revision 2

 

I'v played this game for about 20 hours now running everything maxed except shadow which are on low.
I never go below 35 fps and its usually around the 60-80 mark....gonna double check my graphic options when i next log in just incase i'v fed some bogus info :O
..yep everything maxed except shadows @1080p

 

@Mexic00ls yeah...what does it mean by revision 2? A higher or better model than the revision 1? I owned a m15x but I'm really new to these technical terms and was hoping to get a new 6970m for my gtx 260m upgrade...

 

well i just looked at your profile and saw your rig, and yes you can upgrade to the 6970m. As far as m15x r1 or r2 goes its just that some people consider the pre dell m15x the r1 and the post dell M15x the r2. since you have the post dell your ok (the processor gives it away the dell's have the core i processors)

 

try xp compatibility mode.

 

So how playable is it with a stock GTX260M ?

 

Disable shadows and it plays just fine. I don't know what the deal is with their shadows, but those freakin' destroy even the better GPUs in this game.

The shadows don't really add much to the game anyway in terms of realism - I never think about not having them enabled at all, since when you're actually playing, you're looking at much more mundane things - like health bars and cool downs

 

Wow! Thanks alot for the information and apology for the late reply. On second thought of getting a 6990m now more performance better it is right? Haha. Question, my current gpu is gtx 260m and I'd overclocked it to 650/1100/1650 and I ran bf3 at ultra on all settings with no AA, low AF, no motion blurness and on hbao. Getting 15 to 20 fps but what I am trying to do here is to compare the graphics to a higher specs with same settings. What I am getting is so much more different than the ones I saw in higher specs. The texture and quality are so bad compared to the higher specs eventhough we're on the same settings. I am not trying to achieve performance but rather confused why gtx 260m looks so bad at ultra settings compared to higher end specs. The resolution is 1650 x 1080p.

 

could it be that the 260m isn't a dx11 card but a dx10 card? That would explain the lack of quality vs a newer, more powerful dx11 certified card.

 

Ahhh...That make sense in regard of the direct X. Thanks ")