R 290x for swtor

Hey guys,

My last pc had an i5 3570k, 8gb ram, ssd, 780 sc... And Swtor still had terrible fps. Within the first year I tried a gtx 670, amd 7970 oc and finally the 780!! No luck.

I'm looking into building a new pc I was thinking the i5 4690k with an r 290x...

From what I've read the 290 (stock) out performs the gtx 780? Is that true? I haven't been keeping up with the new stuff... The cards 200 bucks cheaper!!! If it really performs that well it' seems to be worth it... Only negatives I have read... Heat and power usuage.

Though a non reference card should take care of the heat... And driver updates for the power?

Is the 290x the "flagship" single gpu for amd? Was there something newer?

Thanks guys!!

I have asked the mods to move this post to the ATI video card forum section so that better response may be given, since the question is about video cards and not AMD Cpus.
RGone...

I had great frame rates on a 7770, 270x and now a 290. There is something else going on here. swtor is not that graphically intense.

Was your CPU OC'd?

MMO's are very CPU bound. Get that overclock cranking and it'll help you get framerates up a LOT.

I kept everything stock.... The cpu was only in the 50-60 utilization range and the gpu less then that.

Every other game ran smooth! Bf4, Crysis, etc... But Swtor... Meh

yaiie said:

I kept everything stock.... The cpu was only in the 50-60 utilization range and the gpu less then that.

Every other game ran smooth! Bf4, Crysis, etc... But Swtor... Meh

Click to expand...

OC the CPU.
It's only in the 50-60% utilization because it doesn't use all four threads of the CPU.

Hopefully not a super gravedig, but I play SWTOR a whole ton and I just want to add that it is a HEAVILY CPU oriented game, it not like one of the triple A Series that is GPU dependent (BF series, Skyrim, etc., the very populr games)
I seriously doubt you will have any better FPS than you have now. It sinply uses a terrible engine, such that I get 5 Fps Some places woth 1 GPU or both enabled.

Culbrelai said:

Hopefully not a super gravedig, but I play SWTOR a whole ton and I just want to add that it is a HEAVILY CPU oriented game, it not like one of the triple A Series that is GPU dependent (BF series, Skyrim, etc., the very populr games)
I seriously doubt you will have any better FPS than you have now. It sinply uses a terrible engine, such that I get 5 Fps Some places woth 1 GPU or both enabled.

Click to expand...

You can replace SWTOR with almost any MMO and that statement will still be true

You can replace SWTOR with almost any MMO and that statement will still be true

Click to expand...

Very true. MMOs are not generally very well optimized. I believe ESO (Elder Scrolls Online) may use a higher quality engine due to its relation to Skyrim, but the overall reviews on that game are so crappy it's hard to tell either way with the performance.

SWTOR actually uses a beta version of the engine, and the developers are too busy with the Cartel Market (which one basically uses to convert IRL money to fake money) to even care, and the engine can barely handle the 16 man operations that were designed into the game, let alone PvP on the worlds with upwards of 50 people all at once. Even with the most powerful single current GPU (GTX 980?) and the most powerful CPU (i7 4790k? Not well versed in current parts sadly, although I know SWTOR uses only 2 cores at most from my observations on my own system) it is very unlikely you will get good performance in the situations i described above, or even generally. Questing on the newest planet Yavin 4 I average literally 15 FPS, either with 1 card or with 2 (SWTOR does not use SLI, or the effects it has are so miniscule as to be unnoticable) although when I do have it enabled it uses both GTX 670s to 100%.

Meanwhile, Skyrim, even the similarly-to-SWTOR poorly optimized - console port GTA IV I get 60FPS or more AVERAGE with the sig hardware. Spikes sometime reach 100 FPS. Back when I had two E5620's (4 core 8 thread, each) OC'ed to 3.5 GHz (My current X5650's are stock) I only netted negligibly more FPS than I do with my current CPUs at stock, ~1 GHZ below the E5620s. It is clearly NOT hardware that causes poor performance in SWTOR, but the engine itself, in fact I find any performance issues to be almost ALWAYS software related, very rarely hardware. I apologize for ranting like this but I play SWTOR religiously and have had conversations with other hardware enthusiasts (such as my guild leader and others) that use both sides of both the GPU and CPU spectrum (guild leader has an AMD processor and I believe a 270X GPU, one of the higher end AMD ones) and they also all have horrible performance. Don't waste your money.

ESO actually does perform better, I'm hoping it's one of many to come in the MMO world that perform better.

The reason you see no improvement in SLI is because the game is THAT CPU limited.

I, myself, have played on both Intel and AMD CPU's, with multiple NVidia GPU's. Performance didn't change one bit.

Going from my gtx 670, 7970... Even my 780 sc... My fps was always the same! I'm hoping with the 4790k and the newer tech in the 970 (and future driver updates) Swtor might run a little better?

Time will tell I guess. If it's still choppy with a 970, 4790, ssd... Then I give up (upgrading) I'll accept once and for all theres nothing I can do but wait / hope for optimization patches.

It's going to take a few weeks to get all of the money and parts together but right after I log into that game... This will be my next stop! Hopefully with good things to say :O

You won't see much (if any) difference with the 4790K and 970 combo.