Yes, I am one of those people that has a computer that isn’t exactly “up to snuff”. No, I’m not talking about my home laptop; I’m talking about my work computer! After a long chat with Blarghe yesterday I decided to see if I had the spare parts around the office to get a SWTOR rig going for my downtime. After a installations, updates, and finally client downloading I came into work today ready to rock some Republic scum only to find that machine I assembled (Athlon 64 x2 with a geforce 7600) could not handle the intense game!
“But why?!” I said to myself as a pouted. I began pouring over the in game settings with my lagged to hell mouse. “This doesn’t make any sense! I have the requirements, I have everything set low! What could be making it lag so!” 3 fps is the best I could muster.

After extensive research it appears there are some performance tweaks that bioware, for whatever reason, decided not to make part of the default ui! So my friends here is how you tweak SWTOR to either make it have “Legendary graphics” or “Super fail for the work computer” graphics.

Now, of course, you will be making a backup of any files you edit. If you don’t and the game explodes I take no responsibility!!
For this to work, you have to unhide your C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\SWTOR folder!

Also, texture quality set at 0 is the setting you want! Trust me. Bioware has already acknowledged the issue with their textures and their first update will repair it. When you open your clinet_settings.ini you will see a portion of these, you will notice there are alot of options here that are not in your file. Add them and tweak away! After blowing away the shadows I’m at a scorching 30 fps! haha

[Renderer]
Height = 1200
Width = 1920
WindowX = 0
WindowY = 0
DynamicLightsLimit = 2
MeshLODQuality = 1
TextureAnisotropy = 16
FarClipScale = 3.9371195
PlantDensity = 150
D3DFullScreen = true
NativeHeight = 1200
NativeWidth = 1920
doShadows = true
doBlobShadows = true
UseMinSpecShaders = false
EnableBloom = true
VerticalSyncState = true
FullScreen = true
TextureQuality = 0
AllowDepthOfField = true
GammaRamp = 1.037854
SpeedTreeDistanceScale = 1.25
AntiAliasingLevel = 2
enableadvenvirolighting = true
DebugAdvEnviroLighting = true

[Game]
MoviesFolder = ….\Movies
SwtorRegKey = SOFTWARE\BioWare\Star Wars – The Old Republic