I'm not a new player, been playing since launch but have pretty much taken this year off other then logging on once a month to keep my characters active and maybe selling a few items.

My last log on was beginning of Nov 1-5th and again a few days ago, Dec 3rd. A lot has changed in just that short time. Server mergers, map changes and resets of profiles and such.

My issue is choppy graphics and game play. The camera turning and walking/running is all choppy, paused between each step. Game is unplayable.

This is my PC Build:

Windows 10 Pro

Intel Core 7i-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (Not Over Clocked)

16 GB Memory

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560

Games is loaded on an SSD with 170GB free space

PC is hard lined into DSL 12-15MB ownload speeds

I have set all my SWTOR graphics to the lowest settings and turned off V-Sync. I ran Intel Processer Diagnostic Tool and got a clean bill of health. I've run anti-virus, windows defender, defraged all drivers and did disk clean up and uninstalled unused programs, but I don't use this PC for much other than SWTOR.

There was an NVIDIA Driver update that also took place on 11/15, but I rolled the driver back just in case that was the issue. But nothing seems to work. I know with the server merger all my graphic settings were reset so maybe there is something I have yet to find? But before this happened I was using high to medium graphics and game play and smooth.

Any tips for how to fix this would be greatly appreciated.

Intel Core 7i-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz (Not Over Clocked)

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560

SWTOR is a very CPU intensive game. It works best with CPUs with high single-thread performance. (The GTX-560 is good enough for some level of graphics performance.)

However, an i7-2600K should be smooth enough during normal PvE (but, perhaps, suck during PvP and OPs).

So, the first thing to do is to get into the BIOS and check that your hardware is being properly detected and running at the proper specs. The easiest way to do that is to simply "reset" your CMOS/BIOS by using the on-board jumper, OR, enter the BIOS during boot up and choose "Load Defaults" (or similar wording). (To enter the BIOS during boot up you need to press some key, such as DEL, but check the manual.)

Also, of course, make sure you have no malware, or virus, etc, running in the background.

If that doesn't help, the next step might be to start with a clean install of Windows.

And lastly - well, that old i7-2600 is getting rather old compared to newer processors, and it's probably time to upgrade to a newer Intel Coffee Lake CPU such as an i5-8600 or i7-8700 (which would involve a new motherboard and RAM as well)

Note - your DSL connection may be good for raw speed but it could be laggy.

Note 2 - you could also consider upgrading to a new Ryzen processor but they don't have as good single-thread performance as the Intels and might not be as good an upgrade from the 2600 (for SWTOR).

Don't forget that compared to Windows 7, Windows 10 has a lot more things(1) running in the background, and some of them are thirsty in terms of CPU time.

* Windows Modules Installer Worker (part of Windows Update on Win10) is probably the most annoying, but it can at least be mitigated by telling Windows Update to leave you alone for a while.

* Windows Compatibility Telemetry (or something like that) is also annoying, but I have no idea how to tell it to [REDACTED] off and [REDACTED].

(1) The word I wanted to use would have to hide behind a [REDACTED] tag, obviously. The Unicode character U+1F4A9 is probably relevant, though. (Its official name is "PILE OF POO".)

Don't forget that compared to Windows 7, Windows 10 has a lot more things(1) running in the background, and some of them are thirsty in terms of CPU time.

Which is why, in spite of SWTOR only using 1 or 2 cores, it works better on a 4 core CPU.

* Windows Modules Installer Worker (part of Windows Update on Win10) is probably the most annoying, but it can at least be mitigated by telling Windows Update to leave you alone for a while.

You can fire up services.msc and disable both Windows Modules Installer Worker and Windows Update.

That's what I finally did.