Toms Hardware Benchmarks SWTOR

Further to my ramblings about the performance of Star Wars The Old Republic on slow hardware, Tom's Hardware have posted up a benchmark article.

They go into detail about the various quality settings in SWTOR, try various settings such as no Anti-Aliasing, various AA levels, and also test what happens when you change your processor speed and number of CPU cores.

What is really interesting is that an Intel i3 (with 2 real cores and 4 virtual cores) is almost as quick as an Intel i5 (with 4 real cores), despite the i5 costing up to 50% more.

At low detail settings you’ll want at least a Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTS 450 for smooth 1680x1050 frame rates. At high settings, even with 4x MSAA, the game doesn’t need much more, and a Radeon HD 5770/6770 or GeForce GTX 550 Ti can handle 1920x1080.

With texture transparency anti-aliasing enabled, this MMO is much more demanding. At 1920x1080, only AMD's Radeon HD 6970 was able to provide slightly more than a minimum of 30 FPS, although the GeForce GTX 570 was only a little behind.

When it comes to platform requirements, the game is much more forgiving. Really, any quad-core chip will suffice. Or, you could go with a dual-core processor running faster than 2.5 GHz.

So as they put it "Low CPU requirements, but mid-range graphics recommended".

Check out the full article.