Yikes! Well, so far so good. All’s well for the moment. Let’s hope it stays that way.
The FPS varies a fair bit for me … between 100 FPS and 15~20 FPS without much middle ground. It’s not group or crowds or excessive effects or settings. It’s zoning. Any zone or anima jump has a high chance of tanking the FPS.
The fix (for me): swap window focus out and back. Instantly back up to 100 FPS; eg. just alt-tab twice. BTW, I run games in windowed fullscreen. If you’re using a different mode, like real fullscreen, alt-tabbing might be a painful fix.
Ok let me begin to detail my mucking about in the setups of SWL to obtain much much better FPS results with a lot of memory and a fair bit of tweaking …
First of all … most of you know that SWL is using 32 Bit mode for pretty much everything game at its best uses 4GB of Ram Tops and that is pretty much all it gets , some people think there are memory leaks happenning so far i have played extensively on long sessions without seeing my memory monitoring tool get out of hand … THey did happen in TSW but as to this day i have not seen it happen in present version .
And before we begin to open the can of worms of VRAM utilisation I know , SWL barely uses VRAM at all for most of the heavy work … the most memory usage i have monitored tops within 2.5 GB or VRAM dedicated to the game .
What i did see happen on the other hand is that when the game attempts to load complex assests it heavlily accesses two different places . First the \AppData\Local\Temp folder and as well the disk where SWL is installed specificly the shader cache and RDB files . So to speed up the process I decided to create 2 ram drives acting up as cache drives for good measure and installng on each drive the most accessed files .
And Lo and Behold ! Framerate at full ultra on a 6k widescreen resolution jumped all the way up to 90 Frames per second … these are full render frames since i use Vertical Synchronization . Partial redraws are not by any measure a reliable metric when it comes to rendering .
Is the image from all settings to Ultra 4.0 full frame redraws with both Ram Drives and full tessalations.
Below are the results of Crystal Disk Mark.
The machine is not exactly a slouch and bear in mind this is all EEC ram so it will be much slower than Non EEC that does not have to contend with the checkups .
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raises hand
Uhm, will there be a guide on how to do this?
Also: is this still relevant for SWL?
https://forums.thesecretworld.com/showthread.php?81333-Great-tweak-for-Secret-World-(-and-other-games)
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OK , got it almost down to rights …
The biggest bottleneck lies into the temporary sector … so it all comes down to the tools and proper step by step guidance …
- Get Imdisk … that is important it is packed with a set of VERY useful features !
- Create a ram disk that will reflect your C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\local\Temp
- that disk image then needs to be loaded and the environment variables need to point to your newly adopted RamDisk …
RamDisk size does not really matter but loading it into physical RAM helps a LOT . (I would recommend at least 4GB of physical ram to be dedicated to the process … IMDisk has options so you can load the disk at boot time and modify your environment variables to load autmaticly and gives you the capability to step back if you need to so you can revert to your default settings.
SWL’s client using only 4GB of ram tops struggles quickly with pagination especially in full 4.0 and Ulta settings . Make sure you Ram Drive reflects the follwing properties .
And VOILA !
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Hey iindie,
Could be just me, but it seems like maybe a step or 2 is missing?
Your instructions show an img file, but its not entirely clear how that was created, or what is contained in it.
Are you doing anything in the game to populate the temp data before you make an image of it (however that is being accomplished)?
The Imdisk programs loads the data from C:\Users%USERNAME%\AppData\local\Temp
The .img file’s creation is pretty straightforward and the program can create it from the folder as in the third picture. I prefer personally to use my .img file alternatively you can use the folder as shown here :
Pay attention that the path for you creation is an absolute path and not a relative path !
Then press OK to your first creation .
If you prefer to use .img files you can as create that file from the img driver program eject to save the file in .img format . For this you need to unmount the image you just created and imDisk will ask you if you want to save in .img file format … (YOU DO!).
Once the process is done you obtain the following .
Which represents more that ample room … you can modify the size to 4GB and stil have AMPLE room !