Star Wars: The Old Republic Interview

PC Games Hardware managed to corner BioWare Austin's Matt Shaw and Bill Dalton for a brief Q&A about the Hero Engine and other technology that'll be powering Star Wars: The Old Republic.
PCGH: If you had to advertise the visuals of SWTOR what would you mention? Can you list some very modern and advanced rendering techniques that your renderer utilizes (SSAO, Parallax Occlusion Mapping, Depth of Field, Global Illumination or other post effects)?

Bioware: Like any modern MMO, we want The Old republic to run well on a good range of machines. For the more powerful machines we do have normal mapping and lots of post process effects such as depth of field and bloom, cascading shadows, and cloth.

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PCGH: As far as we know the (Hero)-Engine offers support for Direct X 9 only. What are the reasons for this? Are there any existing plans to patch in support for DX10/11 later?

Bioware: For the largest compatibility base for our consumers, Direct X9 is the way to go. We are considering plans for DX11 in the future. That's all we can say at this time.