So I finally got my main desktop computer back and was just wondering how bad FPS drop can get in this game?

I was maintaining 50-60 FPS running on High and driver controlled Anti-Aliasing in the early areas, base off your experiences how bad can the frames drop?

Note: I only just arrived on Dromund Kaas.

Edit: Sorry if I keep making dumb threads, this is my first MMO.

Expect huge FPS drops at crowded places just like any other MMO game. If you normaly run around with 60FPS the drops at least shouldnt be unplayable but who knows.

Currently for some folks the FPS drop in highly populated areas is pretty severe. Severe enough that Bioware is looking into it and there's a long thread on their customer service forum about it.

MMOs can bring mildly higher-end machines to their knees in high population areas because of their CPU-intensive nature but there are some folks on ridiculously high-end machines seeing drops from over 100FPS on average to around 20 at best in the Fleet. Last I checked the line of thinking was that this game, like so many others, struggles with properly utilizing anything more than dual-core processors.

MMOs are notorious for performance drops in hub cities. Keep in mind that your pc is going from rendering yourself, some mobs, and a few other players at a time to rendering yourself, tons of NPCs, and dozens of other characters (typically). The areas are just more demanding, however you also have to wonder how well the engine and game itself utilizes resources.

I'm getting sick of the performance hit on empire station. I look forward to random times I can login and the station will have about 100 in that zone, game still runs fine. But 200+, just shoot my poor computer. I'm getting 5 fps if I'm lucky.

I want an option to pick low pop instances so the game can function normally. The fact that pvp with only 20 or 24 people in a match still goes to &$%^$ makes me concerned.

@Tumbler: Is the station the most demanding area?

@SmasheControllers:

None of the zones are that bad, everything runs fine as long as the game doesn't try and load 50 people at the same time. But empire station is a very small area with the highest amount of players in a single zone. Game goes from wonderful to 5 fps a lot. When they were launching they kept the numbers down to the 100's or so on station, or mabye that is just how many people were there...but with 250 person instances in taht small area it's awful.

I wish there was a way you could opt into smaller instances. Some hardware seems able to deal with it ok but even the high end systems report much lower frame rates than everywhere else. Warzones (pvp) are almost as bad. With empire station it's at least understandable because you can't expect the game to preload 200+ people into memory so you can not have the game pausing but in warzones it should be able to load the 20 or so people and keep the game running smooth....buy maybe not?

@Tumbler: On the fleet I never went below ~30 fps, you think I should be fine for the most part in Warzones and etc?

Dunno if this is relevant but what's talked about in this thread on the SWTOR forums might be a reason for some performance dips.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=162079

@Tumbler said:

I'm getting sick of the performance hit on empire station. I look forward to random times I can login and the station will have about 100 in that zone, game still runs fine. But 200+, just shoot my poor computer. I'm getting 5 fps if I'm lucky.

I want an option to pick low pop instances so the game can function normally. The fact that pvp with only 20 or 24 people in a match still goes to &$%^$ makes me concerned.

But there aint actually 200people in your instance, 200 is the amount of people in that zone and then its divided into several instances right?