Star Wars: The Old Republic: PC Performance, Benchmarked

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Rarely are MMOs anticipated as hotly as Star Wars: The Old Republic. We take a close look at the offspring of legendary developer Bioware and the larger-than-life Star Wars franchise, then tell you what kind of hardware it needs for smooth performance.

Low Detail, No AA

We’ll start out with shaders set to low and the bloom effect turned off. The rest of the detail options are left at their highest settings, since changing them doesn't have a notable effect on performance.

The Radeon HD 6450 is on the edge of playable at 1280x1024 with a minimum frame rate of 25 FPS. All of the cards tested except the Radeon HD 6450 are viable at 1680x1050, although the GeForce GT 240 and GeForce GT 430 also present low minimum frame rates of 25 FPS at that resolution.

Increasing the display to 1920x1080 doesn’t have much of an effect on those two GeForce cards, but the Radeon HD 5570, Radeon HD 5770, and GeForce GTX 550 Ti are really the only options that deliver smooth performance.

Although it doesn't look particularly demanding, Star Wars: The Old Republic seems to require mid-range graphics hardware in order to run smoothly. The Radeon HD 6450 GDDR5 is a fairly respectable low-end card, yet it couldn't muster a minimum 30 FPS at 1280x1024 using the lowest available detail settings. That's a pretty high requirement for an MMO, a genre that traditionally targets low-end integrated graphics hardware in order to accommodate the largest possible install base.

Don Woligroski
279 Comments Comment from the forums
  • hpglow
    Tom's you get bought out by Best of Media, and now the news is a couple days old and stale, we get anoying pop-ups over what we are reading every 3 pages or so, and there are very few cards in this write up. Why do I keep coming here to read stuff? I'm just going to take you guys out of my queue of reads every day you need to go back to what made you profitable.
    Reply
  • Looks like my GTX 460 will handle the game fine. Playing in the tester weekend beta really made me look forward to playing the game.
    Reply
  • jellico
    Ran the game on very high, max viewing distance with:
    i7-2600K
    Radeon HD 5850

    I played with high settings and a 3/4 viewing distance with:
    Core 2 Duo e840
    Nvidia GTS 8800

    I played with with a mixture of low and medium settings and 40% viewing distance with:
    i5 - 750
    Radeon HD 4670

    So clearly, a better video card (even an older one) is more important than a top-end processor.

    This is a great game! Every quest and NPC interaction has voice-overs which greatly add to the dimension of the game. The intro movies are the best I've seen of any game, ever!
    Reply
  • hokkdawg
    I just KNEW this game wouldn't live up to the hype. It has a great single player RPG component, but it really doesn't need to be an MMO. It's like LOTRO - that game is great when sold as a single RPG to play offline, or even with P2P multiplayer. But as an MMO? Totally not worth the monthly fees. Time will tell with SW:TOR, but it sounds like the single player is the primary selling point...and the venture into MMO territory is nothing but a ploy to rake in more income from monthly fees...
    Reply
  • hardstylerz
    So people were fine about the performance of this game but complained about the performance of crysis? which looks a million times better than this...The game looks worse than world of warcraft and yet runs like absolute crap. I smell another ploy to push up sales for graphics cards. YOu can't be serious about the performance of this game. Even skyrim looks better and plays better despite being a console port.
    Reply
  • lunyone
    Well I might be interested, but at $15/month I'm not that interested.
    Reply
  • As a subscription based game, BioWare can continually add content, and it doesn't hurt to be able to group with people for tough encounters or just because you enjoy it.
    Reply
  • SirGCal
    I was on the beta. Thought my system is a bit overkill (OCd 1100T & 6970), it ran like butter with everything maxed and the AA trick activated.

    Still, I'm excited for release. I had a lot of fun in the beta and world PVP seems interesting without being annoying (though time will tell when the whole public gets ahold of it). You can solo much of it, but there are mini-raids starting at level 10 (or flashpoints I think they were called)...

    The stories were just... wow... Sometimes they went a bit weak but they were always so detailed. I can say that this wouldn't be nearly as good as a single-player RPG. Lots of social aspects going on. But it's also not a grind like any other MMO I've done... Never once did I feel the grind of 'go kill 20 of these, bring the eye. go kill another 20, bring the teeth (why didn't they tell me last time).' Infact, kill X anything was a very rarity accept for a bonus xp aspect of which you nearly always doubled before finishing anyhow.

    The big question is; "Will it have a good end-game"... Cause if not (and we didn't get to test that far), then long-term playability will be very limited... But again, we'll see that very soon...
    Reply
  • Will I lag with a low end graphics card in lets say a city or an instance? What would u recommend the minimum graphics to do such things and have a good experience?
    Reply
  • Yargnit
    Perfect timing, I've been trying to decide between a 6950 and 560ti for a new SWTOR rig to get for Xmas. Wish you had tested these specific cards, but this certianly helps still. I've always prefered Nvidia's cause of better drivers, but this makes it real hard to take a 560ti over a 6950.

    Just wish you ran a 1gb/2gb card test. I've seen SWTOR eat tons of memory (2.7GB) & I wonder if video RAM is the same way.
    Reply