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Star Wars – The Old Republic (SWTOR) has pretty much dried-up my technical productivity since it’s release last week. Staying true to my altoholic self, I’ve now got 6 teenage-level toons running around.
I’m surprised, after playing fantasy-based RPGs for the last decade, how much I am enjoying this game. True – it is just another MMO similar in aspects to WoW or Rift. But it’s that change of the menu from fantasy to sci-fi that’s making the transition so enjoyable.
I do wonder what’s happening on Telara…
Anyway, I play on a 27′ iMac i7 using Bootcamp with Windows-7 Ultimate 64-bit edition installed to play both SWOTR and Rift. Installation was really easy – albeit time consuming — and once I got the right (as in correct) combination dialed-in for my graphics settings, game play is very smooth and responsive.
Here’s a screen shot of my settings. Basically, I’m running in full-screen windowed-mode, custom-settings. I have high-texture settings and high character detail, medium texture anisotropy, and low shader complexity and low shadow quality. Grass quality is set to 100% and tree quality is set to 50%.
I’ve reduced the size of the image a bit; click on it to view it in full-screen.
In spaceport, my resting framerate (to enable fps display, press CTRL+SHIFT+f and the fps is displayed in the lower-left corner of the screen) is about 60 fps on average.
Most of the time when I’m bouncing about, I’m usually around 50fps — still very smooth with no noticeable lag, jerkiness or stuttering.
FWIW — I play on Drooga’s Pleasure Barge (server) and my main is named Mal’loathe. Sith, of course.
Hi Michael:
I too am running SWOTR on my Imac 27″ 2.93 Quad Core..was curious as to which video card you were running and how much RAM yours had? I have the 1 GB Nividia 5870 (?) via Windows 7 Professional and have not noticed any real performance issues thus far…this is playing with all graphics set to high..I am running duel screen and noticed lag when I am streaming something else in addition to the game..recently updated to 16GB RAM from OWC..I will let you know how the game responds…I am a bounty hunter myself
I am running on 8gb RAM and have the ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics card installed. Those two factors pretty much determine why you can run at uber-setting and I can’t. The minute I try to bump my settings up, the herky-jerkies settle-in with a vengeance.
I should probably look at the 16gb upgrade…I’ve heard folks running parallels with 16gb and not having any issues at all.
Thanks!
PS: My toons are on Drooga’s Pleasure Barge shard/server — are all sith, and my BH is Kristoff. Thanks for writing and thanks for the tip!
Well I can tell you the memory does not make that much of a difference…but then again it was only 99$ to upgrade to 2x8GB sticks from OWC..For the life of me I can’t remember what server I am on ATM..Siene?…Look for Vento which is my BH….the next mod I am contemplating is to upgrade to an SSD…what OS are you running on the Mac side…I recently went back to Snow Leopard…Lion was acting too strange for my tastes..weird lockups etc….