Bioware: Most SWTOR performance issues can be blamed on low-end PCs

Bioware has said only a small percentage of Star Wars: The Old Republic players are experiencing performance issues with the MMO, and the majority are running the game on a low-end PC.

Speaking with Eurogamer, SWTOR director James Ohlen said most performance issues the development team have noticed are from bugs, so any issues with black screens or drops in frame rate can be attributed to the PC in use.

"For the most part, 95 percent – oh I can’t give you the exact percentage – most of our players aren’t really having performance concerns,” said Ohlen. "However, we know that it’s important that there is a smaller group of people usually with lower-end machines that are having problems in some areas.

"One of the most important [ways] for us to grow our service is to continue to bring in more players, including those players who only have low-end machines. So we have a client team, a team of programmers, whose entire job is to optimize the code, find out where some of the issues are, and then fix that up.

"Most of the performance issues are localized though. They’re things that we can track down. I would call them bugs."

The development team as been on a bug and glitch fixing spree of late, and promises patching and updates of some sort "almost every week". One such issue the firm is looking is the lack of improvement when switching between medium and high texture setting in the game. While players have noted the lack of change in character models, higher-resolution textures are noticeable only during conversations.

Furthermore, over on the public test server, the medium texture setting has disappeared with the only options now being low and high, with the later still looking no different to medium.

In response to the issue, senior online community manager Stephen Reid said the firm was aware of the issue, and the team was currently "tracking down the details with the development team."