devtrackers.gg
Hi everyone,
We’re seeing reports of players who have noticed a drop in quality in graphics and we wanted to offer some insight and also a few steps that players can take to improve quality.
As a reminder, as of 7.2.1, the “min specs” for SWTOR have been updated:
- OS: Windows 10 or later - 64-bit
- Processor AMD: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4000+ or better
- Processor Intel: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0GHz or better
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: Star Wars: The Old Republic requires a video card that has a minimum of 1 GB of on-board RAM as well as support for Shader 3.0 or better.
- Examples include:Intel HD 3000 or better/AMD Radeon HD 7450/Nvidia GeForce 610
- Storage: 75 GB available space
- Internet connection: Required to play
- For players who use laptops, the game will default to using the dedicated GPU.
For troubleshooting steps, a great place to start would be the Troubleshooting graphics on PC article from EA Help.
An important note for laptop players is that Windows has the ability to force which GPU your laptop uses. It can select the lower powered GPU if your laptop is either not plugged in or if you did not specify which GPU to use.
To select a specific GPU, follow the steps below:
- Click the Windows Start Menu
- Type "graphics settings".
- Select “Desktop App” in the dropdown and select your swtor.exe.
- Click Options and select “high performance”
For players who use a NVIDIA graphics card, follow the steps below:
- Right click on your desktop and select “NVIDIA Control Panel”
- Click the Desktop tab
- Check the box “Add Desktop Context Menu”
- Right click SWTOR on your desktop and select “Run with graphics processor”
- Click on “High performance NVIDIA processor”
If you do not see the “Run with graphics processor” option when right clicking on the app, then you can specify the GPU the following way:
- Right click on your desktop and select “NVIDIA Control Panel”
- Select Manage 3D Settings
- Under “Preferred graphics processor”, select High performance NVIDIA processor”
To know what video card SWTOR was given by Windows to run with on the last run you can get this information from the client_settings.ini:
- That file will be located in C:\Users\(YOURACCOUNT)\AppData\Local\SWTOR\swtor\setting\client_settings.ini
- The following example shows what card the game ran:
- InfoGraphicsVendor = NVIDIA_GPU
- InfoGraphicsVideoMemoryMB = 8044
There is also a setting in that file that controls when the game switches to forced lower resolution textures:
- MinspecVramCutoffMB = 256
Note that any card with less than 256MB of memory will use lower resolution textures. However, if you change the above setting to below how much memory you have, that will turn off the forced lower texture resolution. This is a workaround to avoid the lower texture resolution, but it is highly recommended to use an updated video card for optimum overall performance.
Thanks all.