Your technology needs help... lots of help... lots and LOTS of help. :(

I see a lot of people that have issues have SLI setups. It could very well be an SLI thing that is causing lag.

I rarely get lag. I get it in Illum of course and the occasional fleet lag (like this past week where everybody was in one giant group, I only dropped to 30 FPS though). But come on, I would drop to 30 FPS in WoW when I went to Org during peak hours and there was a lot of stuff going on. It seems to be an MMO thing. I cannot play any MMO above medium settings when there are a lot of people around. I do not think it is a coding issue.

I have a Mac Pro with the ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB card. I can play nearly every game on High settings (I wont say max because I turn off AA and all the extras, but I play it on full HD resolution). However, WoW, Star Trek Online, DCUO, and this game I have to turn it on Medium and I still get a little lag when there are a group of people.

BTW the longest loading I have experienced is 30 seconds. Its really not that big of a deal.

Never seen soooo many "game developers" on a forum, ever ,,,,

Difference being is it seems that the OP actually knows what he's talking about....

I've actually unsubbed because of this, sadly. My PC admittedly sucks, especially the graphic card, so I obviously can't blame BioWare entirely, but game performance in my case went over time from "pretty bad, but I can play and I couldn't beg for more" to "horrible, I'm sorry but I just can't play this any longer".

It's kinda weird, because, as I said, I was doing "good enough" at first, even if I had to play with everything at minimum or close to it (hell, I even could use high textures without the game's performance dropping noticeably). But, I don't know if it's because the game has actually become worse in this matter, or it's because I happenned to play on the most populated (and still growing) EU server [ToFN], or if it had to do with playing on bigger planets that require larger loading processes (I don't remember having many problems on Korriban or Tython, for example, and it was good enough in Warzones, but oh god Alderaan -both the Warzone and the planet itself- , that was just horrible), but it has become a lot worse over time, even after changing textures back again from High to Low.

And it's a pity because I like this game as a whole (story, classes, etc.), but if the tech part fails (and I repeat again that it's partially my fault, so I'm not entirely blaming them) then the game and I need to break up. And just from reading everyone's posts it's clear there's something wrong with this game. More so especially when I've played other games with arguably better graphics and they didn't give me so many troubles performance-wise.

It's such a shame how bad the current game engine is, considering how even top-of-the-line PCs aren't enough to make this game run well, due to the engine not using resources efficiently or not even using the full GPU a lot of the time.

Don't understand. I have a mid-range (now) system (64bit I7 on Win7 64 w ATI5750) and am not seeing any major performance issues. Perhaps our interpretation of "well" is different. For me, it's not seeing stuttering or lagging animations rather than top-notch fps. Possible problems for folks could be any of the following:
1. Slow or full / fragmented disk.
2. Minimum memory
3. Using an older mother board that restricts GPU
5. CPU barely up to task
6. Not using latest drivers for GPU
7. GPU overwhelmed by graphics settings in game or by large monitor
8. A GPU older than mine (grin)

Not saying the game engine couldn't stand some tweaks, but asking for a new engine (is this is where the OP is headed) is like asking for a hot rod engine to be installed in a Smart Car. Oh, it can be done, if you disregard things like surviving as a business because of all the money you just spent on a whole new team of developers over a long course of time (these things aren't exactly "plug n play").

The slow load times are due mostly to the extra layer of disk caching they are doing. When you see the loading screen zoom up to 25% and then sit there for 30 seconds, it's because the client is collecting all the various chunks of data it needs for that planet/area and copying them into a temporary cache file. Fire up a profiling tool (or even just Resource Monitor) and watch what's happening with DiskCacheStatic, DiskCacheStream, and DiskCacheArena.

I have the game installed to a fast RAID0 SSD array, so this kind of caching is largely pointless. Not to mention it's putting an incredible amount (gigabytes) of wear and tear on my expensive drives, constantly. I was able to work around the fact that the game beats the snot out of my GPUs by water cooling, but I haven't been able to work around the caching issue yet via RAM drives or anything else I've tried.

I agree 100% though, that the BioWare devs are either not very good, or just not very experienced (or just don't care). Five months since lauch is more than enough time to profile your game engine and find the hotspots.

BTW guys, I'm still waiting for anti-aliasing support on my Radeon 6900 series cards... Although I can't really blame AMD for not being excited about slogging through your rediculous 35 MB of shader code.

I'm a computer technician, programmer, and cisco consultant. I have a custom computer and do not lag at all. I have an AMD Phenom x2 955 oc'd to 3.7 ghz, 4 gigs of ram, a nvidia 460 gtx, and a 120 gig ssd ocz and do not lag at all. I acquired most of my certifications in highschool before college and now build computers as a hobby. I do not lag at all. I've played the game since alpha, but (In alpha I did have to turn my overclocking almost completely off to be able to play the game).

Great post OP and thread conversation to the rest of you.

I am not a gifted code developer or network guy, but I know something is wrong at the core. So many people with awesome machines state the game is at a low FPS, long zone times, and crashes. Others with mid and low range PCs say everything is great.

The hardware that seems to help the most is not the GPU but SWTOR software being loaded into a ram disk or placed on a fast SSD. Can someone explain why this is...even for people with 7200 rpm drives? Sure ram is faster than SSD which is faster than HDD, but what is actually taking so long to load into the game?

Anyone know if this game runs better in a 64 bit OS as opposed to a 32 bit OS?

You sure SOUND like a Cisco consultant.