That's called a bottleneck. Your GPU goes to low useage because something other than the GPU is limiting your performance and by affecting the FPS it's in turn affecting how hard your GPU has to work to keep up. If you normally get 100 fps and on the fleet you can only get 20 fps because of bottleneck X, then your GPU only has to work at about 1/5th as hard as normal because it's not going to render any more frames per second than the slowest bit (whatever is the cause of the bottleneck) can keep up with.

Hmm that's a very noticeable difference on the floor there. However it's very hard to make out the finer detaills when the screenshots have been downsized like that - I'm guessing Photobucket did that automatically because they were over the size limit. Is there any chance you could upload the full-sized screenshots somewhere else sp we could look at them more closely? I'm really interested to see what other differences there might be.

He'd be a pretty damn poor body paint artist then. I'd demand my money back.

Just imagine how the dancing girls must feel: http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i42/LiselleMorrow/Old%20Republic/comparison2.jpg I'd be embarassed if I was forced to wear that and look like the picture on the left all the time.

Check out the texture on the pants of that NPC on the right. Yuck.

It's 12:20 in Austin atm, so it's not quite that early, but they still have a few hours before the office closes.

I always wondered why there weren't more people wondering just WHY the game client suddenly dropped so much in size. It's >12gb less, that's a little much to attribute just to basic optimization of the client. When they released the image of the Collector's Edition contents, it showed 4 game install DVD's (in addition to the soundtrack CD): http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20110722003442/swtor/images/7/70/SWTOR_CE.png To me that seems like they were, at that point, expecting the client to remain roughly the same size until launch. Yet when my box arrived the case only held 3 DVD's and they were numbered as "x of 3" - so the client size didn't just get substantially reduced, it seems it was a very conscious design decision that was made in time to alter the production of the boxed copies.

The only time I see people actually leaving a game because their low end computers can't run the higher settings and they flatout refuse to turn down their settings is when they are so far into denial about their computer's capabilities it's not even funny. Pointing out to these people that they are in denial is like trying to reason with a brick wall usually. Just because you meet the minimum or even the recommended requirements of a game does NOT mean you can always run it at the highest settings. Very rarely you can and that's almost always in games that offer very little to no graphical scaling. However more often than not the way the system requirements work is as follows: Minimum = guideline specs for Lowest settings Recommended = guideline specs for "average" settings The highest settings often require hardware more powerful even than the recommended, especially on higher resolutions like 1080p. 9 out of 10 times when dealing with someone who is complaining about not being able to run a game on the highest settings the problem isn't with the game's highest settings being out of whack, but rather with the player having the wrong expectations about how games should run (especially MMO's which people often assume should run exactly like the X singleplayer games they've played before).

There's probably a correlation here of settings. Last night me and my SO were in a cutscene on Alderaan and his trees flickered, while mine did not. It doesn't appear to be a graphics card or driver correlated thing as we both use exactly the same graphics card and drivers. We do use some different graphics settings. Both of us run max settings, except I have Conversation Depth of Field off and no AA. My SO has both those settings turned on. My bet would be on the AA.

Lol, yeah this is a known bug. Happens to some other NPC's in cutscenes as well. They sometimes seem to get shrunk to "handheld hologram size" for inexplicable reasons.

A new day, a new thread and more side-by-side comparison shots: Nar Shadaa slave girl outfit - ingame (left) <--> cutscene (right) Feel free to add the image to the OP. The more we can get up there the better.

Ok, I'll bite. For the record, my system is: i5 2500k @ 4.2gbz GTX 470 SC 8gb RAM Windows 7 64-bit In other words I equal or beat your specs in every regard. The Imp. Agent armor Chromiie posted looks EXACTLY the same on my rig. Whether you're using Max settings or Low settings, a lot of the armor looks like the backside of a Bantha all the time - and that's just not right. On maxed settings, here is what the worst armor I currently own looks like ingame: http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i42/LiselleMorrow/Old%20Republic/swtor-ingame2.jpg When it should at LEAST be looking like THIS: http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i42/LiselleMorrow/Old%20Republic/swtor-cutscene2.jpg What breaks my heart is that the game can look SO nice in a lot of places - some of the distant scenery looks quite good, for example this view in Dromund Kaas: http://i69.photobucket.com/albums/i42/LiselleMorrow/Old%20Republic/swtor_2011_12_23_19_19_03_466.jpg But when I then try to take a snapshot of my character posing menacingly in front of it it ruins the entire image because the armor graphics are nowhere near on par with the rest of it.

They're called "phishing" emails for a reason.. the people who make these things just use a generic list of email addresses that have at some point in the past ended up on spam mailing lists and they are just angling at random for people who A. happen to play the game and B. are dumb enough to actually fall for their email. I've gotten phishing emails for anything from runescape, which I've never played in my life, to WoW and Aion which I did play but an entirely unrelated email address to the one i received the emails on.

Run the Intel Burn Test for a few minutes and come back and tell us it doesn't do exactly the same to your CPU or worse than SWTOR does. THEN you'd have a point. Until then you're just beating around the bush.

Unfortunately it's much easier to blame a game for such problems than it is to blame either oneself or the manufacturers of the PC and its components. The thing is that the game cannot 'fix' a problem that it isn't the direct cause of - the game is at most only a facilitator for the problem to show up, but it is no more to blame for crashing or overheating your PC than a stress-test or benchmarking tool is. The only thing a game can do is put in artificial restrictions that throttle the useage of certain components so they don't get pushed past the point where problems start to occur. A forced FPS cap in games is an example of this. THAT is not a fix of the problem however, it's a band-aid, a workaround to try and avoid the issue altogether. It's the equivalent of the government trying to solve the problem of car accidents by forcing car manufacturers to put a speed limit in every car that limits it to a topspeed of 40km/h. Yes you'd almost never crash, but we wouldn't call that a fix for car accidents now would we?

True, however I don't think the problem was caused by them not having high rez textures ready to go everything but rather it's the other way around - they DID have high rez textures for everything except at some point during the beta (probably due to complaints about the client size and performance issues) they got cut from the client, which is most likely what caused the huge drop in client size from ~31gb in early closed beta to ~19gb which it is now. Actually they probably didn't drop the high rez textures but rather they compressed them to be smaller, which is what achieves the lesser detail on Medium and the even lower detail on Low. I guess they thought they would hit 2 birds with one stone - stop people complaining their non-high end machines couldn't pull Highest graphics settings and stop people complaining about having to download 30gb on their crappy internet connections. Unfortunately those of us who DO have the graphics power and internet needed are screwed over in the process. We're now stuck with compressed textures that look fairly good in some places but downright awful in others (also because I think they used very different levels of compression - it's not at ALL consistent throughout the game). On TOP of all that we seem to have the forced texture compression on armor textures outside of cutscenes that reduces the quality you see ingame to much less than what it should be on the Medium/High setting - it gets forcibly compressed down to about the same degree as the Low settings do all the time. Giving us the option to disable this forced texture compression on armors would be a start.

Thanks! I just got stuck on the same missing bit and while forum search is disabled, thankfully google search still works.

That seems to be an unrelated bug, but one I've seen before in other games (and this one has quite a few sufferers as well, so you're not alone) - just out of curiosity, do you run a 32-bit Operating System? In other games where I've seen this it was often the result of the game forcing texture compression (forcibly lowering the texture resolution no matter what settings you're using) when the game gets very low on memory - and it often seems to happen on systems with a 32-bit OS due to the inherent memory limitations on 32-bit (less memory available per application as well as less total memory recognized by the system). The other possibility is that it could be related to graphics cards with lower amounts of VRAM (the fast graphics memory on your graphics card). A lot of somewhat older cards have only 512mb or less, so if the game is seeing that as a problem it might doing the texture compression to prevent performance issues. The game just seems to take a very "i know better than you what settings you should be running" attitude - and the saddest part is, it doesn't seem to be working very well at all.

Fixed it for ya.

Bear in mind this is from the same type of people that brought you the Fox news clip that tried to pass off Mass Effect as a "gay sex simulator". Zealotry at its best..

Look, I agree that we need a draw distance slider back in the game as well, since that is also something they ripped from the game before launch and it's such a stupidly easy fix for those with low end cards or CPU-limited performance that I just can't wrap my head around why they would ever want to remove it. However that has absolutely no bearing on what we're asking for here. It does not affect those with FPS problems and here is why... Those having FPS problems running even the Lowest settings are supposedly not using High textures at the moment. But even if they are or want to do so in the future... the very bug we're talking about here is that the High textures are currently the same as the Medium textures. So once the bug is fixed and Medium and High textures actually look different, the option to use the "currently bugged High textures" is still in the game in the form of Medium! So people will still have the option to use those textures if they want to.

I'm going to try and reset my ini file (again) since this patch fixed that problem with the wrong default settings showing - just in case that is somehow to blame for my High textures missing from character select (I tried changing it up and down several times btw, with both OK and Apply).

So we know today's patch didn't change anything about the discrepancy of armor textures in- and outside of cutscenes if you're trying to run High textures, however I just noticed upon logging in just now that my character selection screen is now also stuck at 'medium texture' level. There is no reloading of the graphics anymore when I switch from medium -> high. I was still able to see High textures in the char selection screen a while ago. What's going on here? Also here are some more comparison screenshots: my armor during a cutscene my armor during regular gameplay Both taken at the exact same spot about 2 seconds apart by pressing the intercom button (which briefly loads the graphics you see during a cutscene). And this is an armor I'm wearing because it's one of least badly affected, there are many that are far worse. edit: rummaged around in my storage box a little and found the slave girl outfit which shows the problem even more clearly: slave girl outfit during a cutscene slave girl outfit during regular gameplay

It's why I've stopped bothering trying to have an intelligent conversation with anyone about Skyrim's graphics as well. The discussion there always devolves into two groups of people at each other's throats because they don't understand they're talking about 2 completely different aspects of the game's graphics... With SWTOR I love the aestetics or 'visual design' (as I prefer to call it), the artists really did a great job in some places, but the technical side of the graphics is rather disappointing with very inconsistent texture resolution in places and horrible implementation of some things like shadows (really intensive on high and yet blocky edges).

Perfect example, thank you! I've actually put all armors that look as blurry as yours does in my storage vault in the hopes that they'll look better in the future, because as they are right now I just can't stand wearing them. I've found one, ONE!, robe for my jedi guardian that isn't as blurry as the others, and even though I don't particularly like the colors and the design (it's pink-purplish with white... not exactly 'haute couture' for a dark jedi -.-), I'm wearing it purely because it's the one thing I've found to wear that doesn't look like a blurry low resolution mess outside of the cutscenes. Until this problem is fixed, the cosmetics in this game are seriously disappointing. I saw a fellow player dancing on the fleet station in a slave girl outfit the other day and thought to myself, OMG, is that a gif texture?