No, Video Card = Graphics Card = GPU Basically and for all intents and purposes.

We do know. Yoda was the first jawa to discover valium.

I was present for this in WoW and it was pretty funny. That said, the only place this would do anything in SW:TOR is on the Fleet, because otherwise I'm basically never in proximity of anyone else, ever. Except starting zones. I guess starting zones would be fun. Oooh, unless they made NPCs susceptible too. THAT would be epic.

I love this idea too. Voted. But I don't think it should be the same FPs that require groups of live people. Make new ones that are tuned specifically for such play. Really it's no different than any of the instanced portions of the leveling process, but with slightly more difficult fights. But yeah, the companion interface would need to fleshed out a bit more to allow control of multiple abilities.

AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE, played for a while at stock 3.2Ghz, then got a better cooler and OC'd to 3.8Ghz. There was absolutely no increase in performance. Sapphire Radeon 6870 1GB At 1920x1080, my performance is fine. In the fleet it drops down to around 35 fps, but otherwise I'm sitting comfortably at 60-80 fps in most situations. Still have plenty of stutter, but I don't think any amount of hardware is able to solve that right now. I think you're probably fine w/ 4GB RAM, but there's really no reason not to upgrade to 8 just in case.

I do agree that finding 40 people was a challenge. Especially "competent" people. But competent is a pretty vague term. If by competent you mean they understand the content and mechanics of each boss fight, how not only their class role but other class roles must work together to take down the boss, and their toon is appropriately geared and attuned, then it was nearly impossible unless you were a part of a dedicated raiding guild who raided 4-5 times were week, wiping and wiping and wiping and experimenting and wiping some more. MC near the beginning took upwards of 6-8 hours to clear. And that was only AFTER you'd figured out how to take down all the bosses. Of course as progression guilds geared up and mastered the techniques they could get it down to 3, but the point is, even with highly skilled players, MC and onwards in vanilla, raids in Burning Crusade, and many in Wrath of the Lich King (even with reduced caps) were extremely challenging even for the top guilds. Sometimes especially in later expansions the raids were gated, but before that it wasn't weeks to clear the raid, it took weeks to clear certain bosses, sometimes months. Then after that particularly difficult encounter was beaten, it was on to the next boss. My guild was stuck on Baron Geddon for almost 6 weeks. I haven't raided Cataclysm. Blizzard did something fundamentally different with their raids than Bioware has done with operations. Blizzard made everything slower and more difficult. Leveling and attuning slowed everything down and prevented most anyone from even seeing Onyxia for months after launch, not to mention Molten Core. The fights were technically just more challenging. Many were gimmicky, but that just made them more varied and you had to experiment and push the limits to progress. SWTOR: Here we are what, like 7 weeks after launch? Many people have multiple toons at cap and have cleared the operations. I can only assume, having not done them, that not only do they require fewer players, but they're incredibly simple. A glorified dungeon. Heck even dungeons in WoW were often super duper difficult right after launch, especially for PUGs. Saying it's not fair to compare SW:TOR to WoW is silly. Just because they're different in many ways doesn't mean you can't compare them. Does that mean you can only compare things that are extremely similar? If nobody'd ever compared apples and oranges, we'd all be eating orange-wedge pie and apple cores. They're both large-scale MMOs and they SHOULD be compared, all aspects, all eras, everything. Go ahead and compare current SW:TOR with vanilla or any expansion of WoW. It's fair game. I think Bioware needs to release some technically difficult and imaginative content. Yes, it's only less than 2 months after launch. Normally that would be fine, but they've rested too much on the enjoyment of the leveling process. It goes too fast. I would venture to say the operations are only end-game "heroic dungeons." They haven't released a raid-worthy operation yet. Whereas Blizzard typically starts encounters out really super hard and then nerfs them later, Bioware seems to have pre-nerfed them. I can't see them making them harder. You can start out hard and nerf them and people will whine because that's what people do, but at least you've satisfied the hardcores who can say they did it pre-nerf. All that said, I think the consensus among the most game developers is that the future is in casual gaming. Heck, Blizzard's new MMO is going to be a lot more like Second Life, from what I've heard. If that's true, years from now we might all be reminiscing about how hard-core SW:TOR was at launch.

You can have up to 40 characters across 5 different servers.

I'm more of a solo player also, but I'm confused about how grouping is a faceroll? The group events are intentionally more difficult so that you CAN'T do them solo. The bosses aren't cheaters. They just require a certain level of strategy involving multiple classes and multiple abilities. If you are getting killed by a single strike from a boss, it's because you pulled aggro from the tank or the tank wasn't holding the boss's attention appropriately. Or I guess you are standing in the wrong spot or are horribly undergeared. Point being, you or one of your party members aren't doing something right. In any MMO I've played, the leveling process is solo with grouping opportunities available as options. At level cap, the game is all about grouping with solo opportunities available as options. But solo or grouped, you're going to eventually be on a hamster wheel *until the developer releases new content*. It blows my mind that people are so angry that there's so little end-game opportunities roughly 5 weeks after launch. If you're playing this solo, awesome. I'm willing to bet that by the time you've hit 50, you've put in at least as much time as you would have in a regular single-player RPG, probably more. As with an RPG, replay it with a different character, or put it aside until an expansion comes out. Leveling is all about familiarizing yourself with your character and his/her abilities. When you reach the level cap, you are a well-worn fighter and now it's time to graduate to the next level. The next level is understanding how your class works in a group. How the group works together in a dynamic, finely-tuned, and much more difficult event. I suppose Bioware COULD try and do some kind of heroic single-player stuff, but really it's just the same as doing quests that are 3+ levels higher than you. Plus people would just complain that it's too hard. I'm going to say the same thing as everyone else. You're options are to re-roll and re-play the game, or set it aside until a significant amount of new content has been released.

I want to mate with this thread. So many fond memories of vanilla WoW. Started in March of 2005 and I remember Uther had not yet had it's first Onyxia kill. I got to participate in my guild's first Onyxia kill in May. I played on and off through 2010. WoW didn't get boring, I just kinda grew out of it. I've started SW:TOR because I love Star Wars and I was hoping for another WoW experience. I didn't get it. Not because SW:TOR sucks, but because it's different, I'm different, and the times are different. SW:TOR is still a fun game. I'm not even 40 yet, so I clearly don't know anything about anything and shouldn't even be talking until I've been farming UBRS for 3 months. But in my (probably wrong) opinion, there are two things that could make SW:TOR feel more like WoW and allow people to find more "stuff to do" at cap: 1) higher server populations--I want to see dozens (and hundreds!) of people around me even if the textures suck d*ck; let me turn down textures in the settings and have it actually improve my performance. 2) more sandbox worlds with fun little easter eggs; too many of the planets are corridor-ed; and I want the equivalent of farming the rare elite Bannok Grimaxe in LBRS over and over in the slim chance I'll get the plans for the Arcanite Reaper; or killing Plugger over and over in BRD for the Barman Shanker. Or maybe there's a lot more to this game that we just don't know about since it's been out barely over a month.

I posted a link to this topic in the newish topic that Bioware posted about bug-fixing, asking them to take a look at it if they haven't already: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=255991 I was watching for replies for at least a couple of hours and saw my comment post, with the link to this topic. Now I've gone back through all 40 pages of that thread and noticed that my post has been deleted. Probably Bioware just doesn't want inexperienced users messing with their system in this way, but I also have to wonder if they're putting up a smokescreen. Lemon's solution seems like it's probably very accurately pinpointing a major flaw in the engine. It's kind of annoying if that's why they deleted my post, but I will forgive them if they fix it.

955 BE, at stock was getting solid 80+ FPS in most places, ~35 in fleet and other dynamic spots. Overclocking from 3.2 to 3.8 GHz made absolutely zero difference in my FPS. FYI, 1920x1080 Sapphire Radeon 6870 1GB Everything on High and 2x AA forced in Catalyst

Phenom 955 BE at 3.8 GHz Sapphire 6870 1 GB 8 GB G.Skill Ripjaws 1600 @1920x1080 all settings on high including shadows and 2x AA forced in Catalyst Occasionally get close 100FPS in open world, but usually sitting around 50-60. Fleet and rare other cases I get down to 30-35. I get pretty frequent hitching and my bet's on texture-loading.

A lot of very smart people with systems that far exceed even the recommended requirements are still having issues. It's a new game. The kinks have yet to be worked out. I hope your gameplay proves excellent ;-)

Max you need for a single mid-range card on a PSU is 600w. If you're thinking of going crossfire/sli in the future, then maybe a 1000w. More than anything, make sure you get a good brand, like Seasonic, Antec, or Corsair. A lot of PSUs only pump out a fraction of the power they claim. You can get a Radeon 6870 at Newegg from $140 on up... http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&N=-1&isNodeId=1&Description=radeon+6870&x=0&y=0 No guarantee it will run SWTOR smoothly on all max settings, as a few people with even better cards than that have problems. But I have a 6870 and I average about 45 FPS in most situations. And just because I find this possibility of performance improvement exciting, I'm blasting it everywhere and planning on trying it tonight. So if you get a 6870 or any card really, try this afterward. Especially if you're running Windows 7. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=114264

Hmm, interesting. I've seen a lot of people claim upwards of 15+ FPS improvement, or even more. Seems to vary by system. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm excited to tonight to see if it takes care of stutter/hitching. I'll check back in later to report my results.