I'm glad this is being so diligently worked on. Keep up the good work, Bioware. The MMO market needs some more tough competitors!

The system could use work, but... You seem to have unnecessarily counted steps, or not counted them when you should have. If you count clicking on the "speeder guy" a step, how come selecting the flight master isn't a step? *boggle*

I'm quite happy to see this! Please, Bioware, try to keep up good relations. SWTOR has plenty of potential to be a stellar game and a solid competitor in the MMO market. Most of the big issues I've complained about personally are being patched up in a fairly timely manner. I hope the game can continue to head in the right direction!

I often sit at 60 FPS if I'm staring at something, but if I turn anti-aliasing on or make a rapid camera turn, I'll fall in the large range between 20 and 40 FPS. It's quite annoying and prevents the game from feeling truly fluid.

It's possible to have a game use either graphics API for rendering. World of Warcraft, for example, uses DirectX 9, 11, OpenGL, or what's known as GLL on the Mac client. I'm not surprised that TOR went the ever-so-common DX9 route myself, although I am a tad disappointed. DirectX 9 hardware is being quickly phased out. Alas, XP still holds a fair chunk of the operating system market share.

For most games being developed, stuff like interface, balance, and possibly even game responsiveness fall to different teams of people than those that would handle the graphics engine and/or optimization.

http://wiki.heroengine.com/wiki/HeroEngine_Roadmap I'm not sure how much this would affect SWTOR's implementation, though. I'm sure that by now the engine Bioware's developing on is heavily branched off from the one the HeroEngine devs are updating. Only time will tell!

D'oh, dunno how I forgot to include that one in my examples. Thanks for posting!

DX11 can be used as an optimization technique. A poor implementation would indeed hurt performance, although getting it done properly could possibly make a substantial difference.

I admit that I did an absolutely terrible job linking the two, or even comparing them for that matter. I'll edit the post if I can come up with better wording. **EDIT Reworded it slightly.

DirectX 10 has been an option for developers since Vista's release on November 8, 2006. That's over five years ago. DirectX 10.1 added some minor incremental changes and wasn't overall groundbreaking, and it was rolled out to the public en masse on February 4, 2008. DirectX 11 - the latest and (supposed) greatest version of Microsoft's API - made its debut on July 22, 2009 with Windows 7. What's currently the latest version of DirectX 11 still isn't seeing much mainstream use by developers despite it being two and a half years old. DirectX 9 is still a solid API, but it's just not keeping up to pace. Any modern graphics card from the GeForce 8000 series or later and the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series or later is capable of running at least shader model 4 stuff. Even Intel's modern integrated graphics chips are DX10-compliant. SWTOR is a fun game, but it could be improved. A handful of games (particularly MMOs) have started supporting DirectX 11 in hopes of better performance. World of Warcraft added support with the release of the Cataclysm expansion pack, it's been added to the (rather infamous) Star Trek Online MMORPG for a short while, and Lord of the Rings Online has always been a bit quick at jumping on the bandwagon. Neither title sees any graphical boost with the API, although both games net performance increases. World of Warcraft usually sees about a 30% boost to framerates, sometimes going even higher. I have done some benchmarking on my system and realized roughly a 50% increase in framerates by simply running DX11 over DX9. If you're interested, my benchmarks are available here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3229374095 Adding DirectX 11 support is definitely more complex than hitting a button and throwing together a couple lines of code, but in the end I personally believe it would be a positive investment. I've seen a few sites mention that Bioware was/is considering possibly adding support in a future patch, and I would like to personally vouch my support for that. It would be an excellent addition. SWTOR has a lot of potential and the sooner it's extensively polished with robust features, the better. Now, let's see what kind of replies this thread gets... ¬_¬

While my system isn't bleeding edge anymore, I'd still like to think it's high-end. (:

The i3 is the "economy"-class product, and even i3 processors are quite capable. i5 processors will satisfy most people looking for excellent performance. The i7 lineup is Intel's high-end range of processors.

I just downloaded patch 1.1 and was greeted with 20 FPS in an unpopulated area. I went through and removed the INI files, but that did nothing. I'm running three GPUs (5970+5870), a Core i7 920 (C0 stepping, sadly) at 3.6GHz, and 12 GB of memory. I expect better performance than this. I don't even have anti-aliasing enabled!

*sigh* Got my hopes up that there was a way of doing this already. I was about to look for it, until I saw your other little comment. Account-wide keybinds are a real lifesaver and make the game significantly more approachable. Such a basic feature would be an excellent addition.