User:TechAngel85/SWTOR Modern Guide

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SWTOR Tweak Guide - 2016
Tweaking Star Wars: The Old Republic for graphical enhancement on modern systems.

Created and maintained by: TechAngel85.
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Template:TOC right Template:Heading Welcome! Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR) has been out for several years now. Anyone that has played these games can attest to that the game isn't the best game, graphically speaking. There are a few reason why this game still looks like it does after so many years. The main reason is the game is an MMO. Most MMOs are not graphically beautiful due to their very nature which leads to our second reason. The engines that run MMOs are not on par with other game engines due to them having to take into account the online aspect of the games. Finally, for SWTOR specifically, BioWare had planned higher resolution textures; however, during testing they found the HD textures to cause massive performance drops even with higher-end hardware.

For those reasons, this guide aims to improve the visual appearance of the game as much as possible while maintaining acceptable performance. This means mainly stick with adjusting setting both in and out of the game to help improve the graphics as much as possible. The changes this guide recommends have been tested on multiple planet types to ensure optimal performance across the entire game. Therefore, you might see you have really great performance on Coruscant and what to tweak things further, but I would not recommend this until you have visited planets such as Alderaan which are a little more performance heavy.

This guide will not:

• Replace any textures in the game.
• Be a complete game overhaul such as S.T.E.P.

SWTOR was built upon a modified version of the HeroEngine, which provides users with limited customization. Therefore, this guide will only cover the tweaks which have an actual effect in the game. So, let jump right into it!

System Requirements

The hardware requirements for this guide will be simple to match or beat my own hardware. I know this works on my system so if you match or best my setup, then it'll run on yours.

CPU: Intel Core i5 or greater

GPU: Nvidia GTX 760 4GB or greater

RAM: at least 8GB

OS: Windows 7-64bit (not been tested on 32-bit nor a newer version of Windows)

Template:Heading The first stop along our journey is to open up the game and define the in-game graphic settings. We will basically be opening up the game and maxing out the settings with a couple exceptions.

To be able to edit your in-game settings:

1. Launch the game
2. Load any of or active Legacies
3. Make sure the character is in a safe area so no attacks are initiated
4. Turn off PvP, if enabled (located on the bottom of your map HUD)
5. Hit the [Esc] key to open the in-game menu
6. Choose [Preferences]
7. Now choose [Graphics]

Template:Heading Now it's time to move on the graphics card profile for the game. Unfortunately, I only have a Nvidia card at my disposal so AMD users will have to match the settings in this section to the best of their ability.