Jan 10, 2012

Posted by in News | 12 Comments

James Ohlen Talks Performance To Eurogamer

One of the hot customer service topics since the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic has been the issue of performance. Even though the art is stylized and BioWare optimized it for lower-end systems, it’s still a modern, current-gen MMO. Some players have been reporting very poor performance and in some cases severe framerate drops on certain hardware configurations.

Eurogamer reached out to Game Director James Ohlen for his thoughts on the matter, and gave some interesting information about how many players might be seeing problems, and what is being done about it:

“The thing is, for the most part, 95 per cent – oh I can’t give you the exact percentage – most of our players aren’t really having performance concerns. However, we know that it’s important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines.”

While it’s certainly good news that BioWare is aware of the problem and acting on it, it doesn’t immediately help those players who are having the problem. Are you experiencing any performance issues? Let us know.



  1. For the record, my high-end MacBook Pro has substantial performance problems with TOR. I can solve them by nerfing the graphics, but it has to get to the point where I literally have difficulty distinguishing abilities by icon before the framerate overtops 30. The same machine has no trouble with other graphics intensive applications (e.g. it runs ME2 at max specs and 60+ FPS in all areas).

    Now, I do have another, beefier-still machine that does just fine on TOR, but I think it’s safe to say that requiring the cream of the cream of the crop of hardware in order to play this game is a little…extreme.

    • a gaming PC half the price of a “high-end macbook pro” will run TOR at max setting perfectly fine. Your problem is the Mac.

      I myself am running TOR just fine on a mid-low end gaming laptop.

      • This is an ignorant statement. The hardware is more than capable, it meets the same spec requirements put out by BioWare. I wouldn’t speak about what you don’t understand.

        • Yes and no, my wife’s iMac also has performance issues despite meeting the recommended specs. I think it’s a boot camp driver issue. If it were a PC with the exact same specs I’m sure it would run smooth as silk. I’m hoping a Mac native version will give better performance than what we’re seeing in boot camp Windows.

  2. What about those with high-end PCs and still have fps issues ? And I dont belive its only 5%, check Horrid FPS thread on swtor.com, i think its the longest thread in whole history of swtor over 10k posts, and it started in early beta and still no fix..

  3. I haven’t had any trouble with my high-end PC, but all of my iMacs (very new, very top end) have trouble, due to the tag-team of laptop video cards and really really high resolution screens. Trying to make a poor AMD/ATI mobile-class video card run at 2560xAnything is just cruel.

    My GTX580 has no problems in my main rig, but mobile-class cards just don’t seem to have the horsepower for the larger resoutions.

  4. I have a pretty beefy machine, i7, 10k RPM HD, GTX275… and while something like Skyrim runs fast and loads even faster, SWTOR is a dog at times.

    It isn’t graphics framerate, either. It’s however they load (or unload) assets in the game. My HD can churn at times, and the whole game will stutter… particularly when using ‘flight paths.’ If I alt-tab out, my entire system is running like a dog… then it settles out after a while… but then tabbing back into SWTOR takes forever.

  5. I have a somewhat high-end PC. It’s a gamming PC I built for about 1000$ last year. No issues at all. But if I hadn’t upgraded this year? I’d be in trouble.

  6. E8500 duo and nvidia 460. 4gig ram Win 7. 1650*1050 everything on hig and there you go. No problems whatsoever.
    If however the people demand to run the things in 2560ish resolution… well good luck with that.

    cheerio

  7. I7 2600k, 2x2GB G.Skill, GF 560GTX Twin Frozr ||, SSD

    and im having FPS problems, specially in the fleet, alderaan warzone and crowded areas, but not limited to these..i have removed grass and tree details (0%), no shadows, and i still get huge fps drops.. also shader is “low”, bloom is off, PlantDensity = 0

    if i go to ilum and look at the lasers my fps drops to something like 15

    its gets a little better (obviously) if i turn AA off, but not much.. im not even using supersampling, just 2x MS..and i tried all the combinations of AA, all giving me the same problem (including AA off with the original SWTOR configuration)

  8. I’ve got a decent gaming rig, but do encounter fps issues. Particularly in crowded areas, like the fleet & pvp.

  9. In my case, it performs well with some occasional stuttering on a i7 with dual nvidia 280s and 8 gigs of ram, when in crowded areas or pvp. But it almost is unplayable on a core2 8500 with an ati 5770 with 4 gigs of ram, specially when pvp-ing with a melee class.

    Can’t tell if it’s an fps problem only, or there are server sync issues as well because of the delay in the activation of certain abilities.

    Tried both max and low settings. On the i7 it makes no difference as long as there is no AA turned on.
    On the core2 low settings at native monitor res which is 1080p
    is still problematic.

    Are all the people reporting no problems using nvidia 4xx and up ?

    All in all it still needs work imho.

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