My laptop kind of sucks. It's a little old now, has an integrated graphics card, and generally needs to run games on medium to low. Normally doing such will allow a game to run smoothly. I didn't play much of the beta, but I found the game to feel very sluggish and sometimes unplayable. I don't know if this was just my system or the beta itself.

Can anybody speak on the stability of the game (those who are playing it currently) versus the beta? I really would like to try TOR out, it's been far too long since I've played an MMO, but I'm a little nervous about dropping 50 clams just to see if I can run it efficiently.

I had the exact same concerns that you did. Long story short: yes, it's WAY better.

I started participating in the beta this summer and found the game to be sluggish and borderline unplayable in spots due to the framerate. I have kind of an old midrange system (ATI 5850, E8400), and could barely play the beta on low. Now I'm running everything on high and getting a really solid framerate (at least 40 fps just about everywhere).

So yea, if you played the beta from earlier this year, in my experience it's definitely better. Now if you played some of the more recent beta weekends (a few weeks ago I believe), the performance is roughly equivalent to that.

My computer runs BF3 and the crisis series on Ultra, and in many areas of the game, I get absolutely garbage FPS. Battlegrounds for example are unplayable.

It was like that in the beta.

So take that for what it's worth.