Why is there a copy protection system in the graphics, and is it crippling the game?

At some point in the process it also has to start loading characters and their various assets, as well as their locations (which are continuously updated once initialized).

It's a perfectly plausible explanation for the bandwidth spike, I have to admit.

It's a joke. as for people saying "there are high res textures in the game right now, on your ship in cut scenes and intercom" if you knew anything about this game you would know that in the early beta there were high res textures in the entire game and not cut scenes. the game looked better... night and day difference. So now they only include them in the cuts cenes only? why? what purpose does that have?

There is ZERO reason to disable high res textures. if the end user cant run "high" settings then they lower it. Forcing high res off and then in the PTR erasing the high option and making med to high says a lot.......

open your eyes ppl..... there is something going on and OP has found SOMETHING that may explain some things. OP has found the smoking gun that will lead to the REAL reason why high res textures are off and why performance is terrible.

Now lets see if Bioware actually gives as a proper answer or if its BS

'cuz this is just like that, right?

/sigh

Big difference there is these are customers of BW/EA and if they do not want to lose customers over something that may not even be true than it behooves them to explain. Failure to do so only allows rampant, potentially inaccurate, speculation to continue.

That said, I have no doubts they will address this with comment.

@Tiron_Raptor I can force AA settings in the Nvidia control manager. This proves local rendering on my hardware is being done.

Also, You can monitor your bandwidth as you play the game, and if all assets including textures and animations were being streamed, you would see a constant 3Mb/s. But it is much lower than this, because it is only communicating standard game information (position, chat, actions... game state stuff, not rendering information, which is powers of 100 larger).

As someone already suggested, the remote renderer or the remote process you're so worried about is likely to do with the Hero engine's capabilities. It is a brand new engine with lots of features to assist development, like the ability for multiple artists to work on the same level concurrently, or the ability for someone to play the level and test it while someone else is modifying it.

This does not in any way imply that animations are being streamed.

I hand built my system. All cables run under the MB tray in my full tower rig. My PS is walled off to vent its own heat as well as all drives.2 High rpm server fans in the front, Huge exaust fan. My coolmaster tower has 2 120 mill fans, one pulling one pushing. My comp is a beast. and the temp it runs for SWTOR is just unacceptable for a game with mostly low res textures and blocky shadows. i have watched the temp with all settings off or set to low... with default driver settings and with the driver overriding SWTOR both high and to low. No setting changes the heat the game is causing. That is not normal. I want to know why.

Many Star Wars: The Old Republic players have raised complaints on the official forums about the game's technical performance. A disconcertingly large number of users report poor framerates despite lowering the game's graphic settings or running the game on a high-end PC. BioWare, however, is not convinced that there's anything wrong with the game, and instead the company asserts that users' lame rigs must be to blame.

OK, not really. But game director James Ohlen told Eurogamer that "most players aren't really having performance concerns" and chalks the reported performance issues up to low-end hardware. He goes on to add that "[the team] knows that it's important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower end machines that are having problems in some areas. And one of the most important things for [the team is] to grow [its] service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines." In light of this, the studio has a team of developers who are devoted to fixing performance-inhibiting bugs, so if all goes well, we poor low-end-rig-users will be able to play the game comfortably soon enough.

Here's my situation:

MB MSI G41M-P26, Intel Core2Duo E7300, 4 GB DDR3@1333, Nvidia GeForce 8800 GT, 7200RPM HDD, 700W PSU

And I've had no problem at all regarding reduced fps in crowded zones. I play with 1920x1080, shadows off, rest on high. I usually run with 60fps, and the worst I've had was @25fps.

And the reason of this situation is, and I'm pretty sure that's the reason, I have a 50MB Broadband (I download with 6.25 Mb off internet and I upload with 5 Mb).

Now regarding this server based rendering i'm also sure it's 100% true. My reason to belive this?
- There is allways a slight freeze when opening my inventory
- One day, as never before, i've had 0.5-1 seconds freezes while opening the map. In 30 min it disappeared. So it was clearly some problem at the server end not my end.
- The textures in some areas load in succession, not all at once. If my hardware was of fault, I should experience fps drop while this happens. But no ... I'm at 60fps and the textures keep load one by one. So i't sclear as day that all these textures comes from the server and are not rendered on my machine.