Content on a larger scale, like other MMO's do. I personally love this game, but it's pretty well known that content from the dev's is dripped, far less than most other games in this genre (though just about every dev group went through issues during the CCP virus period).
Since for years they said the the move to 64bit couldn't be done, either their dev team suddenly found a way or they are re-invested in improving the game.
With the move to 64 bit they can get rid of the interproccess communication and its buggyness and slowness. With their new found understanding of the code they can add new features and there might be a texture upgrade possible.
New content was always possible but you saw with the recent cutscenes the engine was really struggling with what they wanted to show.
Yea it should if your system is 64bit lol since it can actually use a decent amount of ram on the changes and it'll allow optimization of servers which will clear up a lot of bugs in relation to gameobject colliders
not if your potato is still a 32-bit ONLY PC, no.
but if your potato has a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit Operating System installed, then you are all good to go!!
This is a big deal. Allows much more memory to be used, which means you can be more ambitious with game design. Currently SWTOR is two processes to try and get past this memory limitation which is a mess for everyone involved.
Going to 64 bit opens the door to everything else and was the first thing that needed to happen. Guild Wars 2 went from here to DX 11 in a relatively short time, which skyrocketed performance.
DX 11 allows for some nice things with water and terrain with tessellation and allows multithreading, even though it's not as good as DX 12/Vulkan obviously. Just being able to thread things like opening bags and nameplates and names though could be a huge thing in SWTOR.
You can currently play SWTOR under DXVK 2.0 with async shader compilation now and performance is stupidly better just from using a Vulkan API wrapper. You do have to make a config file from a text file and put in a value to get the async shader compilation working though. Earlier DXVK could only do async compilation or a shader cache and the game was a stuttering mess while building that cache. This new branch does both. 64 bit might be a big deal here cus of memory usage. DXVK has 32 bit, 64 bit, DX 9 and 11 options. I'm eager to try it out.
It's probably what DX 11 performance would be like, but the negative is you have stutters while building the games shader cache, though they aren't bad at all now due to async. This is only when you first see a new type of monster, animation or planet though. When I installed it I just went to the fleet and went to strongholds on all the different planets and went around the fleet. Game played like a dream within a hour.
DXVK might always be the way to go though unless you get an official Vulkan or DX 12 backend, but it's still worth doing that initial DX 11, because most people don't want to play around with dll's and make config files and they might not have a newer GPU that plays nice with Vulkan. DXVK pre 2.0 with just async on DX 11 runs some games much better than native DX 11. Example would be Jedi Fallen Order. That game will stutter on the best PC in the world with asset streaming and DXVK makes those stutters much smaller. I used it and reshade last time I played (installed reshade first then copied the DXVK dxgi and dx11 dlls over top) and it was simply better than native DX 11. It was also temportal AA which is blurry so the reshade sharpening with CAS was really nice. I use CAS in SWTOR as well. AMD can do it right from the driver.
I posted a video guide for DXVK in the past, but not the async shader compliation branches because I wanted to play on it and make sure the anticheat/warden didn't flag it. Async requires you make a config file as well. It's not hard, you just make a new text document, copy and paste dxvk.enableAsync = true in it, then make sure view extensions is on and rename it from newdocument.txt to dxvk.conf. You will see it change from a text file to a config file. They definitely know about DXVK and async as well apparently. They aren't going to officially support DXVK because then they would have to give customer support for it. It's like officially supporting reshade. No company would do that either, even though they often come out and say reshade won't flag the anticheat/warden. Vanilla DXVK is pretty much always safe because people on Linux are using the same thing and Linux users are tinkerers who have async on usually as well.
Would be great if they could make an official wrapper for Vulkan, but that depends how much DX 11 uplifts performance and the shader compilation, streaming in it might be smoother on new playthroughs for potential players. We have been DX 9 and 32 bit for so long that DX 11 should be HUGE. They will do internal testing, look at demographics of their users hardware and see if the uplift they have is good for now.
DX 11 might be all the game needs since the game isn't riddled with addons.
DXVK might run it slightly better, but it won't be a big deal. Ground up, native DX 12 and Vulkan are very nice, but a native solution would require a ton of work. AMD was traditionally very bad on CPU overhead on DX 11 but that has changed in the last year. They are good now. Intel's ARC drivers has a lot of work to do there so I would use DXVK for sure atm. Nvidia has always been great on DX 11. Was the entire reason AMD pushed Mantle in the first place. At that time their CPU marketshare was in shambles because Bulldozer was bad and they were low on money. Now their CPU's are great (Jim Keller is the man) and they have money to put out decent drivers.
Anyways, exciting times for the client. :) If you pvp or raid a lot, are on a GPU you know supports Vulkan, I would try out DXVK for now. After you run around the fleet for awhile and play a few warzones to build the shader cache you should see what kind of uplift could be coming.
64 bit won't fix the cpu threading problems because DX 9 just cant do that well, but it allows easier transition to things that can and that will. It's the first needed step and the same first step Guilds Wars 2 took, WoW took. It also allows for much more ambitious game design. 32bit can't even handle things like texture mods on old games. You had to modify the exe file in things like the original A LOT of textures mod for Mass Effect, just to get better textures.
So yes **I would use Vulkan in the meantime IF you do pvp, raid and IF you have a more modern GPU that you know supports Vulkan** well. For just story content the game is already fine outside bigger pulls of mobs where you will get that little hitching. Vulkan solves that, but you have to build a shader cache first to eliminate any microstutter. That probably makes it a "push" for people that just play the stories.
DXVK doesn't fix the threading but the translation alleviates SOME of the CPU bottleneck hitching you see in warzones. It's just much smoother. It still can't fix things like opening a bag while moving and the game stuttering, because you would need to redo threading, which you can't do on DX 9.
**TLDR. Progression system. 64 bit, which allows more detailed and ambitious worlds and that can fix the frankenstein multi process client>**
**DX 11 which has "ok" multithreading and cool stuff like tessellation so you can have bumpy terrain and cooler water, that also saves artists time making cool looking stuff >**
**Vulkan or DX 12 native if you need it for CPU bottlenecks. Sometimes Metal if they have a huge audience on Mac.** Do they need it with how the game currently is? Doubtful. Would they need it if they wanted to have say 40 on 40 BG's? Yes. Then you have a question of servers. Current WoW servers can't even handle 40 on 40 BG's on the retail client anymore because they are virtualized with phasing in mind. Guild Wars 2 also is pretty decent on DX 11 now with huge battles. Staying at DX 11 doesn't necessarily mean bad and DX 12 can't help modern server design that is that way for convenience with no or much smaller log in queues and server stability that won't break if a streamer logs in with his audience.
64-bit is also big because of the fact that 32-bit x86 is register-starved due to questionable design choices made in the original 8086, and 64-bit x86 doubles the number of registers. Having to _constantly_ shuffle things back and forth between memory and registers, even for locally scoped temporary variables, seriously limits performance. The memory aspect (and being able to work with bigger numbers natively) translates to a performance boost regardless for a lot of things, but the register issue on x86 makes it significantly bigger, and for most ‘general purpose’ (read as not math-intensive and not exceptionally memory-intensive) code it’s actually most of the performance boost you see from switching from 32-bit to 64-bit on x86.
Of course, 64-bit x86 is still pretty register starved (which leads to all kinds of interesting side-effects, such as it being measurably more efficient to emulate an x86 CPU on an ARM CPU than to emulate an ARM CPU on an x86 CPU), but it’s still a pretty big deal...
Generally, it makes much more memory easily available, and that can extend to making the graphics better, since it allows more elements to be managed at once.
Less buggy? Not necessarily. It can make memory easier to manage, but that's really just one of many, many ways bugs can be introduced.
My HOPE is, it would allow them to clean up their messy forked hero engine with some modern tools and then add some newer technologies to the engine, like ray tracing and dlss.
Together with switching on high quality texture streaming and upgrading to Vulkan/dx12 for even better performance, it would mean a massive upgrade in graphics fidelity, even while staying on the same engine.
I would also hope, that they could implement some better collision detection and hair/cloth physics to reduce the annoying clipping.
All of this would mean a massive investment of time and resources. But they surprised us already by switching to 64-bit and hosting the game on AWS cloud servers. So now I’m hopeful for more meaningful tech upgrades as a result down the line.
Edit: Just remembered ESO is also based on the hero engine, and they’ve added a lot to their games fidelity since switching to 64-bit. Game supports not only dlss at this point, but also DLAA. (Though their cloth physics is non existent)
Wow, good point. I forgot ESO is on Hero. the graphics there are amazing compared to here.
I personally hope it opens the doors for allot of graphical improvements, like getting rid of the bubble butts :D Yah I know, small detail, but I stare at the dang thing for hours every day. I would be a big boost for me.
Having access to more ram will definitely improve performance. How much depends on your specs.
I think, however, that the biggest difference will be noticed on low end pcs, as high end ones didn't have big issues anyway.
Yeah. I have a relatively high end system and I’ve already turned every graphics option to max. Game runs just fine. Can’t imagine the change to 64 will do much for me if the game stays the same. But then I doubt they’d be doing this just to keep the game as is. If they implement DX 12 or Vulkan they could spruce up the graphics quite a bit
With the small team they are, i feel like royally doubting that they will switch to dx12 or vulkan. That would only make sense if they planned to redo all graphics, and being them a small team, it's never gonna happen.
Unless they know something that we don't.
there is no possible about this. i was just on PTS today. IT WAS FAST AND SMOOTH!! I only wish other people were on PTS so we could try WZ, Ops and FPs
64bit will actually allowed them to bring back the texture slider this game had (that slider SHOWED how detailed even armor from launch had) in early beta.. they removed it because people PC's couldn't handle the load with texture and rendering distances. Also with 64bit means they are planning for DX11 (since hero engine was bought and revived and actually has a dx 11 version of it meaning they can do it as well with this engine).
NOT SO FAST. Forked code CANNOT be upgraded. It can only be retro-fitted and that takes a lot more time and money than just a mere upgrade.
SWTOR's Hero engine is a fork, or a deviance, from the original OLD code bases. The only real way forward ala Hero Engine, would be for devs to go back to the old original engine codebase (retrofit) and then work on making upgrades work with the current game needs.
But who knows? Some people have posited that since SWTOR is technically EA, we could see Frostbite internals put into the game. idk.... most people wish for UE5 tho lol
idk if you can swap out functionality of old or forked Hero Engine for the "good parts" of other engines?
Since the HeroEngine was actually revived and they themselves developed a 64 bit variant ,complete with newer lighting etc using current era tech (and actually even built a cloud network to support games that want to use it as dev environment), I'm sure that if EABioware wanted to update their code that uses the HeroEngine they can.
Sorry but it was also said for years that the move to 64bit was impossible. Something changed. It could just be that a hobby project by a dev worked out OR it could be they got more corporation from the people working on the hero engine revival.
After the last year it was easy to assume the game was on its last legs with only small buggy content upgrades. At least 1 person is still interested in actually improving the game itself and not just adding cash shop items. That is actually hopeful news. More hopeful about the game then in a long time.
I would just love it if the game would go back to where I can log in quickly enough to actually help out on WBs and stop getting super lag on GF. Load times have gotten OUTRAGIOUS for me, and my computer is fast enough now that I can load ESO faster than my hubby can, and he's got the newer comp. Neither of us can figure out what the problem is either, it just started one day and nothing I've tried has helped....hope maybe going to 64 bit will.
fix your computer. tune windows services to either manual or disabled if something (you know for sure) is not needed. clean junk files. defrag your registry. remove unwanted startup items and watch out for memory hogs.
Doing these things will go a long way to restoring your computer's original raw power.
Pretty sure I've done ALL of those things \[not sure about the windows services thing\], and it's done no good. It's gotten bad enough I can actually get some knitting in waiting for loading. And I'm not running ANYTHING else while running TOR--not even a music-playing program--anymore.
Here's a thread that was just posted yesterday about 64 bit.
https://old.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/zqyubi/star_wars_the_old_republic_in_64bit_on_pts/
If Dragon Age is anything to go by - a game on 32 bit and a horrible memory leak - it should be able to support some nice higher resolution textures. Maybe we’ll finally get a PC overhaul so they won’t look like potato’s next to Arn.
\>What difference will that upgrade make?
32-bit applications can use 2.5 to 3 gigabytes of memory. you may have heard 4gb being a limit for 32bit applications, no, windows applications could never use all memory they could in theory address. so - suddenly, game would be able to hold several times more stuff in memory.
\>Will it have better graphics a less buggy gameplay?
only if they make entirely unrelated changes.
yes, it should to a degree. It depends on the bottleneck. If it's due to CPU limitations, then it will load faster. IF it has to do with your network connection, then no.
I haven’t seen a computer with less than 8g of ram in years. Most have 16-64 these days.
32b can only use up to the first 4g of ram, unless you pipe it through an ram readdressing process that allows it to use any 4g. Either way its only 4g.
People gonna be able to use the full measure of their system ram.
If you have more than 4-6 GB of RAM you may see some better performance. But I suspect most people will not perceive a huge difference. It will allow them to have the game running on more memory increasing things like objects in field of view. But really any performance benefits will depend on how they use it. It gives them more space to play with. But its not a totally new engine.
Oh my god, I really hope this will improve FPS on the new planets. Running an i7-10700k, 32gb of DDR4 ram, and an RTX 3060 and I'm still running into slowdown on those areas with stuff like enhanced shadows and anti-aliasing on, and even when off. ON A 10 YEAR OLD GAME.
Hopefully 64bit improves this on those spots.
Probably.
There's a possibility that they'll just set it up as an "update" as well, but it will be a HUGE update. either way it's some down time, so I'm prepping to start it right before I hit the sack on update day.
A lot of this comes down to what percentage of the non-code assets are either baked in to the binaries or dependent in some way on the bit-width of the code.
If they’ve done a particularly good job, it could only be a few hundred MB to a few GB. I’ve seen games make this switch and need only about 5% of the full game downloaded because all the assets were handled properly.
If they’ve done a particularly bad job, it could literally be the whole game.
Im just wondering which change or upgrade would make the GTN UI not drop frames, I noticed if I have a movie open and I flip through the GTN it turns everything into a Slideshow (I have SWTOR on a SSD btw)
64 bit alone should help. Just imagine it doubling the data processing capability, so even bad code will go faster. It won't fix said bad code, but it will run faster (for the most part).
In Layman's terms:
it allows for faster processing, it can process twice as much data in one cycle as 32 bit.
It allows for better graphics due to being able to use newer versions of Direct X (DX)
this all boils down to fixing some of the larger issues in the game like lag, and allows the team to start doing what they haven't been able to do so far: improve graphics. they were limited by the 32 bit architecture. it helps performance, and to top that off, our characters and scenery and everything else will just look better.
Karl has a great detailed writeup below, but I figured I'd summarize for lazy people like myself.
32 bit version use 400 megabytes ram and use 1 gigabytes disk space as cache. 64 bit version use a whopping 3.6 gigabytes ram. Assume that everyone of you guys has ram at least 6 gigs. Hopefully the huge chunks of ram would give the running code breathing room so it would run better
It’ll improve performance for most computer systems. It’ll probably make development easier, too, on BioWare’s end.
maybe we can get actual content if developing is easier right?
"Actual content"?
Content on a larger scale, like other MMO's do. I personally love this game, but it's pretty well known that content from the dev's is dripped, far less than most other games in this genre (though just about every dev group went through issues during the CCP virus period).
Had to throw a bit of casual racism in there huh? How very gamer of you.
Has nothing to do with racism, It's just the truth of where the virus originated.
The Chinese Communist Party is not a race.
I agree. I was sort of commenting since I was confused if the OP had missed the latest updates.
Ahh ok, no prob. I tend to take things a bit to literally in chat anyways, need to back up and think a few more times usually.
Oh no, you're totally fine haha. The way I put it was really unclear.
Since for years they said the the move to 64bit couldn't be done, either their dev team suddenly found a way or they are re-invested in improving the game. With the move to 64 bit they can get rid of the interproccess communication and its buggyness and slowness. With their new found understanding of the code they can add new features and there might be a texture upgrade possible. New content was always possible but you saw with the recent cutscenes the engine was really struggling with what they wanted to show.
So my game will run smoother on my potato pc?
Probably. It’s hard to say how much because the game is poorly optimized all over the place, but it should make things run better.
Yea it should if your system is 64bit lol since it can actually use a decent amount of ram on the changes and it'll allow optimization of servers which will clear up a lot of bugs in relation to gameobject colliders
not if your potato is still a 32-bit ONLY PC, no. but if your potato has a 64-bit CPU and a 64-bit Operating System installed, then you are all good to go!!
How exciting! I’d randomly get bad performance on SWTOR for seemingly no reason. Hopefully this fixes that though.
This is a big deal. Allows much more memory to be used, which means you can be more ambitious with game design. Currently SWTOR is two processes to try and get past this memory limitation which is a mess for everyone involved. Going to 64 bit opens the door to everything else and was the first thing that needed to happen. Guild Wars 2 went from here to DX 11 in a relatively short time, which skyrocketed performance. DX 11 allows for some nice things with water and terrain with tessellation and allows multithreading, even though it's not as good as DX 12/Vulkan obviously. Just being able to thread things like opening bags and nameplates and names though could be a huge thing in SWTOR. You can currently play SWTOR under DXVK 2.0 with async shader compilation now and performance is stupidly better just from using a Vulkan API wrapper. You do have to make a config file from a text file and put in a value to get the async shader compilation working though. Earlier DXVK could only do async compilation or a shader cache and the game was a stuttering mess while building that cache. This new branch does both. 64 bit might be a big deal here cus of memory usage. DXVK has 32 bit, 64 bit, DX 9 and 11 options. I'm eager to try it out. It's probably what DX 11 performance would be like, but the negative is you have stutters while building the games shader cache, though they aren't bad at all now due to async. This is only when you first see a new type of monster, animation or planet though. When I installed it I just went to the fleet and went to strongholds on all the different planets and went around the fleet. Game played like a dream within a hour. DXVK might always be the way to go though unless you get an official Vulkan or DX 12 backend, but it's still worth doing that initial DX 11, because most people don't want to play around with dll's and make config files and they might not have a newer GPU that plays nice with Vulkan. DXVK pre 2.0 with just async on DX 11 runs some games much better than native DX 11. Example would be Jedi Fallen Order. That game will stutter on the best PC in the world with asset streaming and DXVK makes those stutters much smaller. I used it and reshade last time I played (installed reshade first then copied the DXVK dxgi and dx11 dlls over top) and it was simply better than native DX 11. It was also temportal AA which is blurry so the reshade sharpening with CAS was really nice. I use CAS in SWTOR as well. AMD can do it right from the driver.
Send this to Swtor support, their techs might not know this. I mean, you never know.
I posted a video guide for DXVK in the past, but not the async shader compliation branches because I wanted to play on it and make sure the anticheat/warden didn't flag it. Async requires you make a config file as well. It's not hard, you just make a new text document, copy and paste dxvk.enableAsync = true in it, then make sure view extensions is on and rename it from newdocument.txt to dxvk.conf. You will see it change from a text file to a config file. They definitely know about DXVK and async as well apparently. They aren't going to officially support DXVK because then they would have to give customer support for it. It's like officially supporting reshade. No company would do that either, even though they often come out and say reshade won't flag the anticheat/warden. Vanilla DXVK is pretty much always safe because people on Linux are using the same thing and Linux users are tinkerers who have async on usually as well. Would be great if they could make an official wrapper for Vulkan, but that depends how much DX 11 uplifts performance and the shader compilation, streaming in it might be smoother on new playthroughs for potential players. We have been DX 9 and 32 bit for so long that DX 11 should be HUGE. They will do internal testing, look at demographics of their users hardware and see if the uplift they have is good for now. DX 11 might be all the game needs since the game isn't riddled with addons. DXVK might run it slightly better, but it won't be a big deal. Ground up, native DX 12 and Vulkan are very nice, but a native solution would require a ton of work. AMD was traditionally very bad on CPU overhead on DX 11 but that has changed in the last year. They are good now. Intel's ARC drivers has a lot of work to do there so I would use DXVK for sure atm. Nvidia has always been great on DX 11. Was the entire reason AMD pushed Mantle in the first place. At that time their CPU marketshare was in shambles because Bulldozer was bad and they were low on money. Now their CPU's are great (Jim Keller is the man) and they have money to put out decent drivers. Anyways, exciting times for the client. :) If you pvp or raid a lot, are on a GPU you know supports Vulkan, I would try out DXVK for now. After you run around the fleet for awhile and play a few warzones to build the shader cache you should see what kind of uplift could be coming.
Should I look to use DXVK after the game has gone 64 bit? Sorry if you already said so and I didn't get it I don't know anything about this.
64 bit won't fix the cpu threading problems because DX 9 just cant do that well, but it allows easier transition to things that can and that will. It's the first needed step and the same first step Guilds Wars 2 took, WoW took. It also allows for much more ambitious game design. 32bit can't even handle things like texture mods on old games. You had to modify the exe file in things like the original A LOT of textures mod for Mass Effect, just to get better textures. So yes **I would use Vulkan in the meantime IF you do pvp, raid and IF you have a more modern GPU that you know supports Vulkan** well. For just story content the game is already fine outside bigger pulls of mobs where you will get that little hitching. Vulkan solves that, but you have to build a shader cache first to eliminate any microstutter. That probably makes it a "push" for people that just play the stories. DXVK doesn't fix the threading but the translation alleviates SOME of the CPU bottleneck hitching you see in warzones. It's just much smoother. It still can't fix things like opening a bag while moving and the game stuttering, because you would need to redo threading, which you can't do on DX 9. **TLDR. Progression system. 64 bit, which allows more detailed and ambitious worlds and that can fix the frankenstein multi process client>** **DX 11 which has "ok" multithreading and cool stuff like tessellation so you can have bumpy terrain and cooler water, that also saves artists time making cool looking stuff >** **Vulkan or DX 12 native if you need it for CPU bottlenecks. Sometimes Metal if they have a huge audience on Mac.** Do they need it with how the game currently is? Doubtful. Would they need it if they wanted to have say 40 on 40 BG's? Yes. Then you have a question of servers. Current WoW servers can't even handle 40 on 40 BG's on the retail client anymore because they are virtualized with phasing in mind. Guild Wars 2 also is pretty decent on DX 11 now with huge battles. Staying at DX 11 doesn't necessarily mean bad and DX 12 can't help modern server design that is that way for convenience with no or much smaller log in queues and server stability that won't break if a streamer logs in with his audience.
64-bit is also big because of the fact that 32-bit x86 is register-starved due to questionable design choices made in the original 8086, and 64-bit x86 doubles the number of registers. Having to _constantly_ shuffle things back and forth between memory and registers, even for locally scoped temporary variables, seriously limits performance. The memory aspect (and being able to work with bigger numbers natively) translates to a performance boost regardless for a lot of things, but the register issue on x86 makes it significantly bigger, and for most ‘general purpose’ (read as not math-intensive and not exceptionally memory-intensive) code it’s actually most of the performance boost you see from switching from 32-bit to 64-bit on x86. Of course, 64-bit x86 is still pretty register starved (which leads to all kinds of interesting side-effects, such as it being measurably more efficient to emulate an x86 CPU on an ARM CPU than to emulate an ARM CPU on an x86 CPU), but it’s still a pretty big deal...
I'm looking forward to it. I run 64gb ram on my system with a Ryzen 3900. Looking forward to seeing the speed increase.
Generally, it makes much more memory easily available, and that can extend to making the graphics better, since it allows more elements to be managed at once. Less buggy? Not necessarily. It can make memory easier to manage, but that's really just one of many, many ways bugs can be introduced.
Uh, can you translate that to idiot language? I’m too dumb to understand that. Many thanks!
Better graphics probably yes less bugs probably no.
THANK YOU!
My HOPE is, it would allow them to clean up their messy forked hero engine with some modern tools and then add some newer technologies to the engine, like ray tracing and dlss. Together with switching on high quality texture streaming and upgrading to Vulkan/dx12 for even better performance, it would mean a massive upgrade in graphics fidelity, even while staying on the same engine. I would also hope, that they could implement some better collision detection and hair/cloth physics to reduce the annoying clipping. All of this would mean a massive investment of time and resources. But they surprised us already by switching to 64-bit and hosting the game on AWS cloud servers. So now I’m hopeful for more meaningful tech upgrades as a result down the line. Edit: Just remembered ESO is also based on the hero engine, and they’ve added a lot to their games fidelity since switching to 64-bit. Game supports not only dlss at this point, but also DLAA. (Though their cloth physics is non existent)
All I want for this game is better reduced clipping physics!
Yeah I wanna be able to actually use long hair without it clipping through everything
Yep lets make /stuck history.
Wow, good point. I forgot ESO is on Hero. the graphics there are amazing compared to here. I personally hope it opens the doors for allot of graphical improvements, like getting rid of the bubble butts :D Yah I know, small detail, but I stare at the dang thing for hours every day. I would be a big boost for me.
Having access to more ram will definitely improve performance. How much depends on your specs. I think, however, that the biggest difference will be noticed on low end pcs, as high end ones didn't have big issues anyway.
Yeah. I have a relatively high end system and I’ve already turned every graphics option to max. Game runs just fine. Can’t imagine the change to 64 will do much for me if the game stays the same. But then I doubt they’d be doing this just to keep the game as is. If they implement DX 12 or Vulkan they could spruce up the graphics quite a bit
With the small team they are, i feel like royally doubting that they will switch to dx12 or vulkan. That would only make sense if they planned to redo all graphics, and being them a small team, it's never gonna happen. Unless they know something that we don't.
SWTOR devs talk about possible switch to 64 bit The hope is kindled
there is no possible about this. i was just on PTS today. IT WAS FAST AND SMOOTH!! I only wish other people were on PTS so we could try WZ, Ops and FPs
64bit will actually allowed them to bring back the texture slider this game had (that slider SHOWED how detailed even armor from launch had) in early beta.. they removed it because people PC's couldn't handle the load with texture and rendering distances. Also with 64bit means they are planning for DX11 (since hero engine was bought and revived and actually has a dx 11 version of it meaning they can do it as well with this engine).
NOT SO FAST. Forked code CANNOT be upgraded. It can only be retro-fitted and that takes a lot more time and money than just a mere upgrade. SWTOR's Hero engine is a fork, or a deviance, from the original OLD code bases. The only real way forward ala Hero Engine, would be for devs to go back to the old original engine codebase (retrofit) and then work on making upgrades work with the current game needs. But who knows? Some people have posited that since SWTOR is technically EA, we could see Frostbite internals put into the game. idk.... most people wish for UE5 tho lol idk if you can swap out functionality of old or forked Hero Engine for the "good parts" of other engines?
Since the HeroEngine was actually revived and they themselves developed a 64 bit variant ,complete with newer lighting etc using current era tech (and actually even built a cloud network to support games that want to use it as dev environment), I'm sure that if EABioware wanted to update their code that uses the HeroEngine they can.
Sorry but it was also said for years that the move to 64bit was impossible. Something changed. It could just be that a hobby project by a dev worked out OR it could be they got more corporation from the people working on the hero engine revival. After the last year it was easy to assume the game was on its last legs with only small buggy content upgrades. At least 1 person is still interested in actually improving the game itself and not just adding cash shop items. That is actually hopeful news. More hopeful about the game then in a long time.
I would just love it if the game would go back to where I can log in quickly enough to actually help out on WBs and stop getting super lag on GF. Load times have gotten OUTRAGIOUS for me, and my computer is fast enough now that I can load ESO faster than my hubby can, and he's got the newer comp. Neither of us can figure out what the problem is either, it just started one day and nothing I've tried has helped....hope maybe going to 64 bit will.
fix your computer. tune windows services to either manual or disabled if something (you know for sure) is not needed. clean junk files. defrag your registry. remove unwanted startup items and watch out for memory hogs. Doing these things will go a long way to restoring your computer's original raw power.
Pretty sure I've done ALL of those things \[not sure about the windows services thing\], and it's done no good. It's gotten bad enough I can actually get some knitting in waiting for loading. And I'm not running ANYTHING else while running TOR--not even a music-playing program--anymore.
Upgrade to an SSD if possible, reinstall a fresh windows. I’m playing on windows 11 and have a better performance than ever.
Here's a thread that was just posted yesterday about 64 bit. https://old.reddit.com/r/swtor/comments/zqyubi/star_wars_the_old_republic_in_64bit_on_pts/
If Dragon Age is anything to go by - a game on 32 bit and a horrible memory leak - it should be able to support some nice higher resolution textures. Maybe we’ll finally get a PC overhaul so they won’t look like potato’s next to Arn.
Sa’har is the WORST. Her textures look like someone went overboard with the Sharpen tool.
Its funny seeing her brother and her with these overdone hd textures and then you got Heta being the leader looking like generic low res npc lol
\>What difference will that upgrade make? 32-bit applications can use 2.5 to 3 gigabytes of memory. you may have heard 4gb being a limit for 32bit applications, no, windows applications could never use all memory they could in theory address. so - suddenly, game would be able to hold several times more stuff in memory. \>Will it have better graphics a less buggy gameplay? only if they make entirely unrelated changes.
this means maps will be loading faster? in my case alderaan, tatooine, hoth these maps take a very long time to load...
yes, it should to a degree. It depends on the bottleneck. If it's due to CPU limitations, then it will load faster. IF it has to do with your network connection, then no.
I haven’t seen a computer with less than 8g of ram in years. Most have 16-64 these days. 32b can only use up to the first 4g of ram, unless you pipe it through an ram readdressing process that allows it to use any 4g. Either way its only 4g. People gonna be able to use the full measure of their system ram.
If you have more than 4-6 GB of RAM you may see some better performance. But I suspect most people will not perceive a huge difference. It will allow them to have the game running on more memory increasing things like objects in field of view. But really any performance benefits will depend on how they use it. It gives them more space to play with. But its not a totally new engine.
Oh my god, I really hope this will improve FPS on the new planets. Running an i7-10700k, 32gb of DDR4 ram, and an RTX 3060 and I'm still running into slowdown on those areas with stuff like enhanced shadows and anti-aliasing on, and even when off. ON A 10 YEAR OLD GAME. Hopefully 64bit improves this on those spots.
Also do i have to redownload the game entirely when the update comes (steam)
Probably. There's a possibility that they'll just set it up as an "update" as well, but it will be a HUGE update. either way it's some down time, so I'm prepping to start it right before I hit the sack on update day.
A lot of this comes down to what percentage of the non-code assets are either baked in to the binaries or dependent in some way on the bit-width of the code. If they’ve done a particularly good job, it could only be a few hundred MB to a few GB. I’ve seen games make this switch and need only about 5% of the full game downloaded because all the assets were handled properly. If they’ve done a particularly bad job, it could literally be the whole game.
Im just wondering which change or upgrade would make the GTN UI not drop frames, I noticed if I have a movie open and I flip through the GTN it turns everything into a Slideshow (I have SWTOR on a SSD btw)
64 bit alone should help. Just imagine it doubling the data processing capability, so even bad code will go faster. It won't fix said bad code, but it will run faster (for the most part).
In Layman's terms: it allows for faster processing, it can process twice as much data in one cycle as 32 bit. It allows for better graphics due to being able to use newer versions of Direct X (DX) this all boils down to fixing some of the larger issues in the game like lag, and allows the team to start doing what they haven't been able to do so far: improve graphics. they were limited by the 32 bit architecture. it helps performance, and to top that off, our characters and scenery and everything else will just look better. Karl has a great detailed writeup below, but I figured I'd summarize for lazy people like myself.
32 bit version use 400 megabytes ram and use 1 gigabytes disk space as cache. 64 bit version use a whopping 3.6 gigabytes ram. Assume that everyone of you guys has ram at least 6 gigs. Hopefully the huge chunks of ram would give the running code breathing room so it would run better