For those of you who think you could be getting more out of your awesome computer's hardware in terms of game performance might want to check out this thread from the official forums. Before I upped my settings, my FPS went from ~30 to ~110 which allowed me to turn up most of the settings I had had on low. Turning shadows on high is like a 50% drop in FPS, so if you can afford to do it, go for it. I've left them on low but turned everything else up and run at a steady ~60 FPS during combat.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=114264