test content
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc

HUD/UI makes my game almost unplayable.

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
HUD/UI makes my game almost unplayable.

Several users have posted this on the forums for a long time, some time ago, along time ago. Its time it gets fixed.

UI/HUD slows down my, and couple of others, the game down SIGNIFICANTLY in terms of FPS.

- Show inventory, minus 10 FPS
- Show Character/ship stats, minus 10 FPS
- Show Configuration/Options screen minus 10 FPS
- Alot of overlays in the game, especially reticles on ships, npc's, mines. Names on ships, NPC's. Minus 20 FPS!!!


And now it comes:
- DISABLE HUD/UI via keybind: FPS increases to 60FPS+

Im really really getting sick of this, I can barely play PvP with this TRIBBLE. It has something to do with the overlay engine or such? It seems like its mostly affecting Nvidia people.

People complain that the game goes very slow and drops FPS like crazy with alot of spam on the screen. The funny thing is, this most likely does not have ANYTHING to do with the rendering of the 3D models and such which are present on the screen. Its the **** UI thats slowing the whole game down.

It almost looks like this part of the game is not Hardware accelerated or something?...

My information for Developers:
- Nvidia Mobile GT 330M (256MB Dedicated memory)
- Having this issue since i play this game since December. My drivers have been updated all the time and are up to date as we speak
- I can even put everything on the lowest of the lowest qualily, the game FPS still drops SIGNIFICANTLY with alot of TRIBBLE on the screen (again refering to windows, transparent windows, inventory window, ship overlays, etcetera.

Is there any chance the Developers might look into this soon?
Thank you very, very much.

Edit: Ive done some additional testing which might be useful for the Developers; Ive enabled Ambient Occlusion, which makes the FPS go down to 22FPS or so (Not nice to play this way). But when I now try to reproduce this problem, opening up Inventory, adding alot of overlays to the game in a high spam area or something, the FPS does not drop because of it. Nor does it increase for even 1 FPS when i disable the whole HUD. This almost makes me believe this has something to do with each other?
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    i have made a thread about this a long time ago... nobody cared.
    i'd be surprised if anybody reacts here.

    it is 100% correct what you say.


    ...ultimately i got sick of it and just threw more Hardware at the Problem
    (actually Shooter Mode with 30 - 40 FPS just sucked donkeyb***z , so i blame shooter mode for my decision to waste money on my latest hardware upgrade ;P )

    got myself a new CPU,
    now i rarely fall below 60FPS (only the exchange still sucks up FPS... but who cares)

    it's silly that i needed to upgrade from a Q6600 @3,1GHz to a i5 6500K @ 4,6GHz...
    which officially does not even *exist*, you have to overclock to even get there :rolleyes:

    requirements on the DVD Box:
    Minimum: Core 2 Duo 1,8GHz (lolololol)
    Recommended: Intel E8400 (= 3,0 GHz)


    i guess this is correct if you deactivate the UI ?


    well, now i am happy with the game as it is.
    60 FPS around ESD, in ESD, on SFA, PvP.... nice (only Quo'nos is around 50-55 FPS)

    btw. GPU is a GTX460...


    Of course "MMO's are optimized for low end systems"...
    that is why we have Polygon Budgets on our spaceships... and can only do so much with textures.
    ...funny enough

    haha lol sure whatever you say sir.

    All i see is a obvious excuse to not make awesome looking Spaceships or Detailed Interiors,
    while the crappy looking UI eats up half the Framerate...



    also... go to the HUD options and deactivate all the needless UI spam.
    i do not display, names, boxes etc.
    all i dipslay are healthbars *if needed*
    and only boxes of enemy ships + team members + friendly NPC ships.



    you also can hide the XP bar on top of the screen (at VA1 you don't need that thing anymore)
    and every row in the Powertray LESS means more FPS
    so try to keep it at 2 rows + the BOff Tray.

    With my old system i could even see 5 - 10FPS difference if only my Inventory was full or empty! (while opened)


    //edit:

    here is my old thread, even the pictures still work:
    http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=183283
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    question how do you turn off the XP bar?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    Z3R0B4NG wrote: »
    i have made a thread about this a long time ago... nobody cared.
    i'd be surprised if anybody reacts here.

    it is 100% correct what you say.


    ...ultimately i got sick of it and just threw more Hardware at the Problem
    (actually Shooter Mode with 30 - 40 FPS just sucked donkeyb***z , so i blame shooter mode for my decision to waste money on my latest hardware upgrade ;P )

    got myself a new CPU,
    now i rarely fall below 60FPS (only the exchange still sucks up FPS... but who cares)

    it's silly that i needed to upgrade from a Q6600 @3,1GHz to a i5 6500K @ 4,6GHz...
    which officially does not even *exist*, you have to overclock to even get there :rolleyes:

    requirements on the DVD Box:
    Minimum: Core 2 Duo 1,8GHz (lolololol)
    Recommended: Intel E8400 (= 3,0 GHz)


    i guess this is correct if you deactivate the UI ?


    well, now i am happy with the game as it is.
    60 FPS around ESD, in ESD, on SFA, PvP.... nice (only Quo'nos is around 50-55 FPS)

    btw. GPU is a GTX460...


    Of course "MMO's are optimized for low end systems"...
    that is why we have Polygon Budgets on our spaceships... and can only do so much with textures.
    ...funny enough

    haha lol sure whatever you say sir.

    All i see is a obvious excuse to not make awesome looking Spaceships or Detailed Interiors,
    while the crappy looking UI eats up half the Framerate...



    also... go to the HUD options and deactivate all the needless UI spam.
    i do not display, names, boxes etc.
    all i dipslay are healthbars *if needed*
    and only boxes of enemy ships + team members + friendly NPC ships.



    you also can hide the XP bar on top of the screen (at VA1 you don't need that thing anymore)
    and every row in the Powertray LESS means more FPS
    so try to keep it at 2 rows + the BOff Tray.

    With my old system i could even see 5 - 10FPS difference if only my Inventory was full or empty! (while opened)


    //edit:

    here is my old thread, even the pictures still work:
    http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=183283

    Yeh but still, come on. I have Anti Aliasing on 4x, Anicostropic filtering on 16x. Lightning on High, Shadows on High. Post processing on. Literally everything is high except for Ambient occlusion which REALY slows down the game.

    Even with these settings I can play a really messy match with dozens of mobs, mines, spam. At long as the UI is off. But without it, the game is hardly playable. I mean u dont know what ur doing. lol

    Probably nobody else cares, or doesnt even seem to notice its actually the HUD which slows down the game considerably. (They always blame the spam, but not the real reason its getting choppy).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    I get the same thing too

    turning the HUD/Ui off there is a noticeable increase in FPS.

    If it helps I use an AMD 6870 1GB
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    Same problem.
    I have a crossfire of HD 5850.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    Same issue on a Radeon 5870. They really need to optimize the UI.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti and I get the same issue.

    I have noticed something, though. Using my G15 keyboard with the performance monitor on...

    Whenever the UI is up all the way, my CPU performance is dropped drastically, say down to about 50% or so, which causes massive stuttering.

    Whenever I do Alt + F12 to hide the HUD/UI completely, my CPU performance increases up to about 80% and everything runs absolutely smooth.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    so you are complaining that framerate drops when you set all of your graphics settings to high, but only lowered AO?
    :rolleyes:
    and your graphics card is only a 256mb?

    my card has 1gb and I can barely run at max settings.;)

    Try reducing the other settings, you'll notice a marked improvement in FPS. You don't really need AA at 4x or AF at 16x, if you cut those in half you won't even notice the difference graphics wise, but that alone should improve your FPS significantly. If you still need more you can set shadows and lighting to a lower setting, again, you probably won't notice the difference unless you are looking very carefully, and that will squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Also cutting back the draw distances will help, you don't really need to see more than 150 feet or so ahead of you on the ground anyway.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    ACES_HIGH wrote: »
    so you are complaining that framerate drops when you set all of your graphics settings to high, but only lowered AO?
    :rolleyes:
    and your graphics card is only a 256mb?

    my card has 1gb and I can barely run at max settings.;)

    Try reducing the other settings, you'll notice a marked improvement in FPS. You don't really need AA at 4x or AF at 16x, if you cut those in half you won't even notice the difference graphics wise, but that alone should improve your FPS significantly. If you still need more you can set shadows and lighting to a lower setting, again, you probably won't notice the difference unless you are looking very carefully, and that will squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Also cutting back the draw distances will help, you don't really need to see more than 150 feet or so ahead of you on the ground anyway.

    as i said i have noticed the exact same behaviour, and i had a 856MB GTX 260, now i got a 1GB GTX460...

    of course on lower end machines it will produce even worse results, but isn't the default PR excuse of all MMO Dev's to have sucking graphics?
    Because it has to run on as many low end PC's as possible to reach the most possible customers???

    Well for STO it's not the Polygon Count on the low quality Spaceships... it's the friggen UI overlays that slow everybody down and the only way to counter it is to throw more Hardware at the Problem.

    Noxu wrote: »
    I have a Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti and I get the same issue.

    I have noticed something, though. Using my G15 keyboard with the performance monitor on...

    Whenever the UI is up all the way, my CPU performance is dropped drastically, say down to about 50% or so, which causes massive stuttering.

    Whenever I do Alt + F12 to hide the HUD/UI completely, my CPU performance increases up to about 80% and everything runs absolutely smooth.

    That info isn't worth much without knowing what the GPU does in that time... and what kind of CPU you use.

    Try AIDA 64 (formerly known as Everest), it has a nice customizable display for the G15 and can monitor pretty much everything you ever might want to know.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    yes, please please cryptic. The ui based lag is pityfull and has been forever. If you can only afford below min spec pc's at your office. Changes to the UI will be good for you and for us. We might even send you some cups.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    The loss I expirience is no way near what you guys are describing, but I have to agree... The HUD needs a overhaul to avoid being such a FPS drain.

    I demand this for Season 5 (there... now we are getting it for season 6).
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited August 2011
    Z3R0B4NG wrote: »


    That info isn't worth much without knowing what the GPU does in that time... and what kind of CPU you use.

    Try AIDA 64 (formerly known as Everest), it has a nice customizable display for the G15 and can monitor pretty much everything you ever might want to know.

    Well, my CPU is an AMD Phenom X4 9500 Socket 2 AM2+ (940) and it's slightly overlocked to 2420.0 Mhz.

    A little better info? =p

    I'll have to get the AIDA64 for the GPU bit, though.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    ACES_HIGH wrote: »
    so you are complaining that framerate drops when you set all of your graphics settings to high, but only lowered AO?
    :rolleyes:
    and your graphics card is only a 256mb?

    my card has 1gb and I can barely run at max settings.;)

    Try reducing the other settings, you'll notice a marked improvement in FPS. You don't really need AA at 4x or AF at 16x, if you cut those in half you won't even notice the difference graphics wise, but that alone should improve your FPS significantly. If you still need more you can set shadows and lighting to a lower setting, again, you probably won't notice the difference unless you are looking very carefully, and that will squeeze a few more FPS out of it. Also cutting back the draw distances will help, you don't really need to see more than 150 feet or so ahead of you on the ground anyway.

    No you obviously dont know what problem we are having.

    We said that we can run most of our settings on high and even very high, and still having great framerates in lets say; SOL system with dozens of ships floating around. BUT only when we disable the H U D. or U I. U S E R I N T E R F A C E.
    or O V E R L A Y S .

    The difference is nearly 40/50FPS sometimes. Its just incredibly insane.
    Since when did games require more CPU/GPU load to draw some overlays and menu's rather then 3D models and stuff? I never experienced this in any other games, which much more sophisticated HUD's.


    Noxu wrote: »
    I have noticed something, though. Using my G15 keyboard with the performance monitor on...

    Whenever the UI is up all the way, my CPU performance is dropped drastically, say down to about 50% or so, which causes massive stuttering.

    EXACTLY. This has been mentioned before by someone else, I have observed it before. As soon as we enable the HUD/UI again the CPU seems to do very little, something is definately not optimized here. I have checked it myself and my CPU usage drops drastically with TRIBBLE on the screen.

    Alot of times, especially people in PvP complain about the game getting laggy with all the mine and petspam. Unfortunately we have the HUD to blame for that 99% of the time, instead of the 3D model real time rendering, polygons etc.


    It seems we have quite some support now, perhaps Cryptic or a Developer can check this out or promise us this will get optimization in the near future.
    Developers, can we please shed some light on this?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    @Marctraider
    All you say is 100% true, even on a GTX 460 with 1GB memory the UI FPS drop is perceivable.

    However this bug exists since beta, and was mentioned countless times.
    To be honest, I've given up hope the devs will ever fix these flaws in the game engine.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    is anybody playing champions? does it have the same problem? I mean common cryptic all those F2P players would love to actually have responsive game. If you can't get it fixed, how about acknowledging the problem?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    Does this issue happen with AMD/ATI cards? I mostly see just Nvidia here...
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    Yes it does i have a crossfire of hd 5850 and i have the same problem.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    Its probably not even a 'bug' just a badly designed/programmed Graphics UI system.

    Lets compare it to Windows 7's Window Manager, I can run the game in Full Screen Windowed mode, and I can move around windows (From windows 7) in the foreground thus over the game with Aero turned on, transparency, full shadows, it hardly affects the game FPS at all. I dont see much of a difference? I assume they both utilize the specific GPU/DirectX stuff which makes this all possible.

    Windows 7's system is clearly optimized, other games UI/HUD is clearly optimized, STO on the other hand needs some big improvements.

    I would almost believe if you would say that the HUD/UI/Menu's are not even hardware accelerated but all by the CPU. lol
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited September 2011
    Same Problem with AMD HD6970, althoug it never drops that low
    When i disable the hud the fps stay solid at 60

    the rest of the sys is
    intel q9650@3,6
    4gb ram

    i run the game as window maximized
    with disabled hud and the game windows minimized it hangs around at 14% cpu
    with lots of windows open ingame its at over 30%
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    I'm curious if there have been any improvements to the FPS on the F2P server.

    I haven't had a chance to test it out, but I'm curious.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    Noxu wrote: »
    I'm curious if there have been any improvements to the FPS on the F2P server.

    I haven't had a chance to test it out, but I'm curious.

    Nope... There hasnt
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    To OP.
    In regards to your problems. Honestly it sounds like you have something else going on with your system for your fps to drop so much.
    Honestly I would try this before spending a ton of money.

    1. turn off background programs (taskbar items, like steam, camera software, even some anti-virus programs like norton tend to slow down systems)
    2. Don't run browsers with multiple tabs open at once.
    3. itunes is a system hog if you have it, the same about real player.
    4. extra trash programs put in by computer maker (unless home built)
    5. kill any unneeded programs that are running in task manager. like many software updaters, java, logitech, adobe. Before starting STO.

    Also you might check if you have multi-core rendering enabled in options under the video tab in the troubleshooting area.

    As a gamer from way back when windows 95 had memory and video problems out the ying yang. Anything you have running in the background takes away from your cpu and gpu ability to run the game properly. So I turn off everything that my system doesn't need to run while I'm gaming. Thus I never have slow downs like your are having.

    later I hope this helps with your problems.
    Just so you know my system specs.

    AMD II x2 550 @2.8ghz
    8 gigs ddr3 ram
    ATI 6670 with 1 gig ddr3
    500gig WD hard drive.
    Realtek onboard sound.
    21inch monitor.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    wolf421 wrote:
    To OP.
    In regards to your problems. Honestly it sounds like you have something else going on with your system for your fps to drop so much.
    Honestly I would try this before spending a ton of money.

    1. turn off background programs (taskbar items, like steam, camera software, even some anti-virus programs like norton tend to slow down systems)
    2. Don't run browsers with multiple tabs open at once.
    3. itunes is a system hog if you have it, the same about real player.
    4. extra trash programs put in by computer maker (unless home built)
    5. kill any unneeded programs that are running in task manager. like many software updaters, java, logitech, adobe. Before starting STO.

    I do all of that and the UI does lag to hell and back, especially when there are a lot of objects on the screen. This is the only game apart from RIFT that give questionable performance at all settings.

    Their UI has always been garbage. I remember when looking through the accolades window would slow down the game bigtime. But now it's manageable. So they have done some changes, just not enough.


    Edit:

    It seems that the lag for me is no longer there when a lot of objects are on screen. :)

    I was in a match earlier with 5 carriers (lol) with no discernible lag.

    I guess that mid-Sept patch did its job. :) Here's hoping it stays that way.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    FallingSky wrote:
    Z3R0B4NG wrote: »

    The UI needs a serious overhaul as it is, because it eats more Framerate than all the 3D Graphics combined -> http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=228866


    The UI suffers from being CPU bound, and single threaded. Both of those problems are non-trivial to solve and changes we can trivially make don't typically achieve noticeable gains. With that said, we do know about it and we are looking for solutions.


    FYI, this is what the OP is talking about. Its bad programming short and simple, and it needs a fix.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited October 2011
    I have not seen this issues though I do believe it exist. It seems to affect ATI cards much less from what I have seen on the forums. I would suggest one thing and I am sure you probably have done it but I will suggest it so it is on the record.

    A week or two ago my game suddenly went from being butter smoother on my three screens to being utter TRIBBLE unless it was set to one screen only. I tried different driver versions, I tried various settings and none of it helped and I was getting really ****ed off.

    So I made STO do a full systems file verification and while it reported nothing was wrong after the verification it now runs better than before. Give it a shot it might clear up some issues for you though it will not fix the coding issue it might help some.

    Oh hey I just thought of this lol. It is a OLD trick I used to use when the timing would get off in a game that did not like multiple core CPU's and would TRIBBLE up the animations or the game play or whatever. Try to manually assign the CPU part of STO to you least loaded core and manually set what you can to keep that core semi free. It can also work to set it to the second or third most used core if you have more than two and for it onto that thread. I have not done this in a while but when I used to do it it would give me some noticeable performance increases. It will not fix your issue nor will it be like having a brand new CPU for STO but it might get you enough to make the issues bearable or not as noticeable.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2012
    Except that dev post doesn't really explain why the UI is slow. Just that it's CPU-bound and singlethreaded. So what? Is it recalculating all displayed statistics on every game frame? If so, why?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2012
    Starbuck: Fix the fracking UI cryptic!

    See even starbuck agrees!

    This issue makes my game near unplayable.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited February 2012
    I was getting slow downs too. Till I discovered the bios setting 'cpu thermal throttling'. With this disabled everything is fine
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited April 2012
    It doesnt matter anymore guys. I have two cards in crossfire now, game works fast enough.

    Still this problem is very much alive with some testing I did.

    Only solution, buy faster Graphicscard/CPU :p
Sign In or Register to comment.