Oh this lovely gem rears its head again. Basically there's a huge drop in frame rate whenever the sound is on. The more sound effects and music there is, the worse the problem, and I'm talking exponentially worse.

 

Turning the in game sound off (or for that matter alt tabbing out of the game with "background audio" off) makes the game run as smooth as butter, but as soon as the sound it turned back on, choppy frames here we come! I've seen differing reports, some saying its a sound driver issue, some saying its graphics related and some blaming the game or even the bios.

 

So far I have rolled back my audio drivers to the earliest I could, reduced and increased the audio quality. Updated the sound drivers to the most recent version. Updated my graphics card drivers and nothing seems to be working. Now some of you may suggest turning down my graphical settings which would most likely solve the problem however why is this a problem my sound shouldn't be bottle necking my entire system! For what its worth this doesn't happen in any other game, its exclusive to swtor. Someone help plsss

not sure if related but an issue i've encountered on several occasions is that the background music from Tatooine seems to persist when heading on to Alderaan.

 

maybe it's something similar? background noise stuck from some previous area getting looped.

Tested the sound thing and there is definitely an improvement but at this point its just the game's poor optimization.