[Kyral]

Originally Posted by Nixl

edit 2: Okay, I am shaky on the details, but a consensus is that the game is rendered partly on your computer and partly by the servers. I think it is pure speculation, but some say that it is a means for BW to prevent players from taking textures or changing them. However, this causes a host of performance issues for the reason that not only are the servers performing their normal game functions, but also streaming textures to your computer. Hence, the high texture setting was removed because it was causing even more stress for the servers. This could potentially explain a lot of choices made by BW to work around this anti-theft program. Again, I think this is still speculation at this point.

In essence, to prevent "theft" of textures, BW has some of the textures on the servers, but combined with normal server traffic is causing performance issues.

Originally Posted by Stephen Reid

- We are not using any form of 'remote rendering' as has been suggested in this thread. Nothing is being pushed from 'server farms' or anything similar. The research paper linked to in the original post is not related in any way to any aspect of our game client.

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- None of these processes are for copy protection of any kind.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...31#edit1501831

And for high textures:

Originally Posted by Stephen Reid

That screenshot is from a cinematic in-game. As stated, cinematic scenes use high resolution textures because we have control over how many characters are rendered on-screen at once. This is how the game was always intended to look in cinematics. We did not 'remove' high resolution textures - they were always in the game for use in cinematics.

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The first major changes will be in our next major Game Update, which will have the version number of 1.2. Those changes will bring greater visual fidelity to your character and those around you, but will still allow for good performance in situations where a lot of characters are on-screen at once. In other words, for those screenshots of your character in their best gear, you should see a marked improvement.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showt...74#edit1499874

Let's see how this turns out.