SWTOR uphill battle

[destia]

I played on high, shadows low and without AA for few days with 9800GT and Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 3.2GHz and 4GB RAM, so it's definitely not requiring a killer computer.

[Deleted]

running 1920x1080 res on my old phenom 2 with 8gig ram and an ati 5770 (win 7 64 ultimate) - everything on max with 2x aa forced on from the control panel - runs smooth.

I have, however, read elsewhere that the graphics settings are borked atm, and the textures are only 'medium', not 'high' until its patched, so I can only assume when the 'proper' high rez textures and in game aa is added will the powerful rigs start coming into their own.

[notorious98]

running 1920x1080 res on my old phenom 2 with 8gig ram and an ati 5770 (win 7 64 ultimate) - everything on max with 2x aa forced on from the control panel - runs smooth.

I have, however, read elsewhere that the graphics settings are borked atm, and the textures are only 'medium', not 'high' until its patched, so I can only assume when the 'proper' high rez textures and in game aa is added will the powerful rigs start coming into their own.

There's AA in the 1.1 patch. So no more having to force it.

[nogard64]

I can do 25 man raids on my basic laptop at work on wow but get like 1-2 fps in swtor (so i afk bgs for xp/creds). if i didnt have a beast machine at home i wouldnt play swtor nor would i upgrade just to play it.

the sad thing is you hardly need a beast machine to play SWTOR, the PC gaming community has been so spoiled and locked in a time capsule just trapped in this "because I can run wow then everything is ok" mentality, they fail to realize they are usinng machines thats equal to about 2002 specs. So now their PC aren't even close to updated and adequate for a 2012 game.

The min specs for swtor is really nothing. You can run it on $600 PC, thats hardly considered BEAST, a beast PC with dual or even triple SLI GTX 580 would cost around 2-3 grand.

My point being if you look at the calendar and consider what year it is, the PC for SWTOR is nothing.

[Fencers]

Above post is accurate.

I am pretty sure I can play Warcraft on an iPhone.

[luccadeo]

I see the WoWfanboy misinformation machine is in full swing.

[Grapemask]

From what I've gathered, the game has some kind of coding hijinks that makes the performance vary wildly across machines. I've seen as many people with top of the line machines crying about performance on the Customer Service boards, even at lower settings, as I have of people at the lower end of the computer spectrum. They are "investigating" and a response is expected eventually, but that's looking to be another case of Bioware's poor problem prioritization.

As for myself, I definitely am part of that bunch that has poor performance with a computer that should run it just fine. I've seen suggestions that the game causes systems to overheat and that doesn't surprise me - I can turn the game on and run at the highest settings flawlessly for about 15 minutes, and then it gradually turns into an agonizing slideshow after that. Yet at the same time, my machine shows no actual symptoms of an overheat other than Star Wars running sluggishly, and the "high" settings aren't even actually high until they decide to fix that particularly glaring problem.

Regardless, Star Wars isn't exactly a groundbreaking visual eyegasm to begin with. It doesn't have massive open space where you can see for miles, it employs rendering tricks we were using back in the Quake engine days to break up line of sight. It's a series of cubes with almost all of its visual effects pulled from texture rendering technologies to add detail and depth. It's poor programming that it runs or displays any worse than World of Warcraft, which honestly despite its cartoonish texturing, still has more model detail since Wrath than most of Star Wars does.

My last couple days of playing Star Wars have been completely dominated by bugs and annoyances that were reported more than 6 months before the release of the game, so excuse my annoyed tone today :P

[Grapemask]

From what I've gathered, the game has some kind of coding hijinks that makes the performance vary wildly across machines. I've seen as many people with top of the line machines crying about performance on the Customer Service boards, even at lower settings, as I have of people at the lower end of the computer spectrum. They are "investigating" and a response is expected eventually, but that's looking to be another case of Bioware's poor problem prioritization.

As for myself, I definitely am part of that bunch that has poor performance with a computer that should run it just fine. My machine is new-ish, well above both the minimum specs and the "suggested" specs, and I run pretty much every other game to come out recently at high settings. I've seen suggestions that the game causes systems to overheat and that doesn't surprise me - I can turn the game on and run at the highest settings flawlessly for about 15 minutes, and then it gradually turns into an agonizing slideshow after that. Yet at the same time, my machine shows no actual symptoms of an overheat other than Star Wars running sluggishly, and the "high" settings aren't even actually high until they decide to fix that particularly glaring problem.

Regardless, Star Wars isn't exactly a groundbreaking visual eyegasm to begin with. It doesn't have massive open space where you can see for miles, it employs rendering tricks we were using back in the Quake engine days to break up line of sight. It's a series of cubes with almost all of its visual effects pulled from texture rendering technologies to add detail and depth. It's poor programming that it runs or displays any worse than World of Warcraft, which honestly despite its cartoonish texturing, still has more model detail since Wrath than most of Star Wars does.

My last couple days of playing Star Wars have been completely dominated by bugs and annoyances that were reported more than 6 months before the release of the game, so excuse my annoyed tone today :P

[konaman]

I'm running the 2500k with a 570 and 8 gigs of ram and swtor still hiccups for me in the imperial fleet.

[Boathouse]

To be fair, I know a lot of people currently (A warlock officer in my guild who rerolled to SWTOR and my wife) who were holding back on buying a new PC just because all they played was WoW. Both of them built new computers just for SWTOR, and I myself am thinking about upgrading again. That's not really having an uphill battle, it's because of the low end requirements needed to run WoW have made people save money by not upgrading. As every computer gamer SHOULD know, if you plan on playing PC games seriously, usually 2 years is about the time before you need to upgrade SOMETHING in your machine.

[Hellfury]

Every game coming out this year is gonna have high requirements, no use bitching about this one game. You will have to upgrade regardless unless you just go back to WoW or some other game that was created within the last 5 years. GW2 is gonna be interesting for requirements, BF3 is a comp killer, etc...

BF3 runs super nicely on my PC at medium/highish, swtor not so much even at loweest possible.

[konaman]

BF3 runs super nicely on my PC at medium/highish, swtor not so much even at loweest possible.

Yup basically the same for me I run BF3 at max fine but as soon as I enter the imperial fleet in swtor I drop to 10-20fps.

[Lilbruz]

You don't even need that, unless you're counting monitor, case, power supply, dvd-rom, and hard drive costs. I'm running this game with 4 MB RAM, a 450 GTS, and a dual-core 5300. My fps run at about 30 regularly. It's never choppy. A big key is switching to 64 bit Windows. Otherwise, the RAM, video card, MB, and processor ran me less than $400. Not that expensive.

Wow, you must be a wizard !

[Sebbah]

I am in the middle of making a little video just comparing the 2 games on max settings, how anyone can say star wars has superior graphics is beyond me.

Have you ever seen how the character models in WoW look like without the textures? They have just a handful of polygons. Those are horrible. Don't kid yourself WoW it's not known for it's graphics. Have you ever looked closeup to the orc textures, troll etc texture? Not saying that the graphics of ToR are top of the line but saying that they aren't better that WoW's is plane ignorant.

[Raeli]

You dont need some mean machine to run that game by any means, playing on a 42 inch tv 1920x1080 resolution with only a 5750.

If we are talking about the graphics I must say they are truely an eye sore. Play everything maxed out, still get jagged edges, low quality looking shadows and the textures on armor and other things look like clay that you smeared into other colors to hide any definitive lines of detail. I am in the middle of making a little video just comparing the 2 games on max settings, how anyone can say star wars has superior graphics is beyond me.

Just bare in mind that you are playing:
1. without Anti-Aliasing, something that is fixed in a patch soon.
2. with medium resolution textures (even if it says high for you, it is medium, check between the two, there is no difference. It is a bug they are working to correct)
3. shadows also most likely are suffering the same issue that the textures are, as they are indeed quite low resolution - even if this is intended, it has been brought up, and it's not impossible to refine them.

[Bolson13]

My mate runs this game on a PC that is from around the time that nvidia 9800 came out (it was the best then). That is roughly 4 years old. Runs the game fine, not on highest obviously but also not on lowest setting everything.

[jakeoff13]

I was under the impression most PC gamers expected to buy a new PC every 3 or 4 years or at least upgrade. Why is it a surprise that a new game would expect to be run on a newer PC?

[abijax]

It's a surprise because the game looks like a 4 year old game at best and having a monster PC built for BF3 you wouldn't expect ToR to hog all resources and still have random fps drops even outside the fleet and to require manual memory cleaning after long sessions.
And I'd guess people with 4-5 year old PC thought they'd run it without a fuss based on how it looks.

[Deleted]

I can do 25 man raids on my basic laptop at work on wow but get like 1-2 fps in swtor (so i afk bgs for xp/creds). if i didnt have a beast machine at home i wouldnt play swtor nor would i upgrade just to play it.

OT, but do you have time to raid when you work? :3

[felix8024]

LAPTOP Dell inspiron N5110 i3 Mobile AMD Radeon HD 6470M 2GB ram
(+2GB, i had to upgrade more ram because pc rewriting textures all the time making game hard to play)
Now i play without any problems, details are on low but, works smooth like hot knife cutting butter.