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.

Test System And Benchmarks

As usual, we try to represent performance across a wide range of graphics hardware. We include cards from the low-end Radeon HD 6450 and GeForce GT 430 to the powerful Radeon HD 6970, GeForce GTX 570, and a GeForce GTX 460 SLI setup. Star Wars: The Old Republic does not work with CrossFire using the latest AMD Catalyst drivers, so we were unable to test a dual Radeon HD 6850-based platform.

Our testing shows that the lowest frame rates in this game are usually outdoors, especially when foliage is involved. We’ve found the Twi’lek village on Typhon to be a good representation of a demanding area, so we made our benchmarking passes at this location using Fraps.

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Test Hardware
ProcessorIntel Core i5-2500K (Sandy Bridge)Overclocked to 4 GHz, 6 MB L3 Cache, power-saving settings enabled, Turbo Boost disabled.
MotherboardMSI P67A-GD65, Intel P67 Chipset
MemoryOCZ DDR3-2000, 2 x 2 GB, at 1338 MT/s, CL 9-9-9-20-1T
Hard DriveWestern Digital Caviar Black 750 GB, 7200 RPM, 32 MB Cache, SATA 3Gb/sSamsung 470 Series SSD 256 GB, SATA 3Gb/s
Graphics CardsGeForce GT 430 1 GB DDR3GeForce GT 240 512 MB GDDR5GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 460 1 GB GDDR5GeForce GTX 570 1280 MB GDDR52 x GeForce GTX 460 1 GB GDDR5 in SLIRadeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5Radeon HD 5570 512 MB DDR3Radeon HD 5770 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6850 1 GB GDDR5Radeon HD 6970 2 GB GDDR5
Power SupplySeasonic X760 SS-760KM: ATX12V v2.3, EPS12V, 80 PLUS Gold
CPU CoolerCooler Master Hyper TX 2
System Software And Drivers
Operating SystemMicrosoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64
RendererOpenGL
Graphics DriverGeForce: 285.79 Beta
Row 11 - Cell 0 AMD Catalyst 11.11
Games
Star Wars: The Old RepublicBeta, Twi’lek village, Fraps
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