Stefan Mileschin

It looks as though SWTOR's "mystery" of the disappearing hi-res graphics has finally been solved, though most people aren't going to like the answer. Apparently the high resolution graphics featured in the beta were removed due to gameplay issues but, from the looks of things, a hi-res fix of sorts might be in the works. To understand that I've got to get technical for a minute. When a character in the game is 'seen' by another character - ie, gets close to your field of view - the client has to 'draw' that character for you to see. As the character is 'drawn' for you there are a number of what are known as 'draw calls' where the client pulls information from the repository it has on your hard disk, including textures, and then renders the character. Every draw call that is made is a demand on your PC, so keeping that number of draw calls low per character is important. With our 'maximum resolution' textures a large number of draw calls are made per character, but that wasn't practical for normal gameplay, especially when a large number of characters were in one place; the number of draw calls made on your client would multiply very quickly. The solution was to 'texture atlas' - essentially to put a number of smaller textures together into one larger texture. This reduces the number of draw calls dramatically and allows the client to render characters quicker, which improves performance dramatically.

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2012/01/...al_in_swto r/