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What's the update on DX11 in this game?
thedoctorbluebox
Member Posts: 749 Arc User
So a while back, Cryptic implemented "Beta" DX11 support, you can manually select the D3D 11 renderer in the game now. However, the game isn't exactly using any specific DX11 unique features like DirectCompute acceleration for lighting and shodowing effects, or Tessellation on characters and environment, or advanced Ambient Occlusion effects and other effects directly related to DX11.
So, what's the latest update on DX11 support Cryptic? Going to see any DX11 updates anytime soon, maybe Season 7?
I really want to re-visit DX11 performance and image quality in this game when updates are made, I wrote this back in January when Beta DX11 support was added - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/01/17/star_trek_online_dx11_performance_review/
So, what's the latest update on DX11 support Cryptic? Going to see any DX11 updates anytime soon, maybe Season 7?
I really want to re-visit DX11 performance and image quality in this game when updates are made, I wrote this back in January when Beta DX11 support was added - http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/01/17/star_trek_online_dx11_performance_review/
Brent Justice
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Post edited by thedoctorbluebox on
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Co-Leader of Serenity's Grasp
That was a while back (pre forum change, probably an "Archived Post" now), but i would not expect Tesselation to make it into STO after that comment.
I have not used the existing DX11 option because of the black textures, but mostly because i get slightly better performance in space, but around 5 FPS less on ground (DS9/Q'onos were clearly stuttering more, and every time i turned my head the CPU load spiked), it is clearly different, but not faster or better in my opinion.
I guess we will only see any updates to DX11 with Season updates when they merge their "branches" (base code version numbers).
I recently upgraded from a Geforce 260 to a Geforce 670 and in all of my other games i got a phenomenal increase in performance, In The Secret World i went from medium/high graphical settings with x2 AA and getting 40 -50 fps to max settings with x8 AA and getting 70 - 120 fps, in batman archam city i went from medium settings with low physX and getting 30 - 40 fps to max settings and high physX and getting 60 fps.. In Skyrim i went from high settings and x2 AA and getting 40 - 50 FPS to ultra settings and x8AA and getting 90 - 200 FPS.
In STO i went from getting 30 - 50 fps to 60 - 65 fps, with no graphical niceness boosts whatsoever..... talk about underwhelming.... even in DX9 mode i should get somewhere around 100 - 200 FPS considering STO's rather basic graphics (hell i get between 100 - 250 FPS in just cause 2 and its one of the nicest looking DirectX 10 games there is).
Maybe Cryptic should spend some of their lockbox money on hiring a dev or two who actually knows what their doing with Direct X !
Under the video tab, open up the Troubleshooting options at the very bottom. Turn OFF Framerate Stabilizer and Auto-Stabilize Framerate. Also make sure Limit FPS at the bottom is OFF. This should give you the maximum possible FPS the game can render.
Though I prefer to leave the framerate stabilizer enabled for a more consistent performance. With framerate stabilizer off the fps will change dramatically and the change in fps bothers me.
But it's up to you, at least it will give you something if all you want is the fastest possible FPS in the game.
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I have tried disabling those settings already, they make no real difference to the overall frame rate.
Ultimately im not really that bothered, i always knew STO was a rather shoddily made game, i just never imagined its graphics engine was as poor as it is.
Actually funny story, when i first put in my Geforce 670 and reinstalled windows, STO was the first game i tried and lets just say i had a massive attack of buyers remorse and started panicking thinking "ohh god have i spent a lot of money on a card that's not much more powerful than my old card". Then i got my other games installed and checked out them and ran some benchmarks and thought "hhmmm STO's graphics capability is a bit pants compared to everything else."......
when i changed from a GTX260 to 460 there was no difference whatsoever in framerates.
then i updated form my Q6600 (@3,1GHz) to a Core i5 2500K (@4,6GHz) and the framerate skyrocketed.
in my case the old CPU was just at the ceiling anyway and the GPU was bottlenecked by it and couldn't run at full speed.
But when the season 3 beta test went to tribble i noticed on that my CPU load would be sitting around 60% - 100%, when i switched back to holodeck the CPU load would go back to the 25% - 30% range. Sadly whatever TRIBBLE Cryptic did back then went live and has been live ever since. :mad:
Our graphics engine is actually pretty decent. The problem is that because we are an ongoing game, which needs to support very low end cards, there are some things that higher end cards are capable of, which we can't take advantage of without alienating our lower end users. I talked some about that in the Starbase Incursion Flashlight discussion a while back.
We have to make sure low end can run our game. Anything we can add on, which is purely eye candy, and isn't required for gameplay, we will add.
The graphic programmers have been working on DX11 for a while now. I haven't heard any specific updates from them recently, but I know that they're still on it.
As for specific features, I'm not aware of all of them. I do know that we have looked into tessellation before, and found that it is NOT something that can just be applied across the board. Assets have to be built with tessellation in mind, or they just break. It's not because they were built poorly before, it's just a different way of going about things. The good news here is that we can turn tessellation on at the material level. So we can, as we go forward, build with that in mind, and potentially use it in future productions.
I'd love to have access to DX11 shadows, but I haven't heard anything about it from the programmers.
Listen to this guy.
Quad core dont matter. Game utilizes only 2 cores. so they need to be fast, REALLY fast.
My Q9450 at 3.8GHz wasnt enough for +60 smooth FPS at high quality.
Next to that, the UI/HUD is not properly, if all, GPU accelerated. Thats the main reason why going from a 6750 or whatever to a GTX670/680 has little effect under alot of circumstances.
Even Dynamic Lights still lag my PC in pvp matches or fleet defense like it hangs on the CPU, while it should be GPU rendered/calculated? Its just stupid.
670GTX + i7 3770K OC'ed to 4.5GHz and still i cannot play this game on max with +60 smooth fps. Only when i disable Dynamic lights. Even then, very occasionally i drop below 60. with my 2 CPU cores fully utilized, 2 doing absolutely dog****, and GPU also at a bare 50% utilization.
Until cryptic optimizes their engine, id say upgrade your CPU because a GPU upgrade might not do the thing u would like to see
With all due respect, this game requires DX9. Aero utilizes DX9, and all other properly accelerated by the GPU UI is created for DX9, so from that aspect its just not right what you are saying. And this IS the most problematic thing that slows down our game in STO.
Try opening up your inventory and some other windows, try opening your mail, see your FPS drop. Not GPU related, because its all being drawn by the CPU, which is old these days. and all dx9 cards can handle it about now.
but whatever, just be sure that im pretty sure fleet defense is lagigng for alot of playrs becauseof it, NOT because of the 3d models needing to be rendered, but because of all the overlays and what not have 2 be calculated by the cpu.
You are basically creating content your own engine can barely handle on the most decent of computers. even high ends. I hope a programmer here can confirm my findings of this game, because it sure has been posted a couple, if not many times before. And yes, i heard a dev say that unfortunately this wont change in the near future. But since u guys make content that spams dozens of reticles boxes, names, etc you should make a proper engine that can handle it.
STO can use all 4 CPU cores, normally STO uses between 50% - 60% of my i7 and sometimes can jump all the way up to 99%. I have watched the usuage of "GameClient.exe" on the resource monitor of windows 7 on my second monitor while playing the game.
One thing i did find interesting back in the summer was some days when it was hot i had to disable STO from using 2 of my cores to keep the heat down and stop my CPU fan from ramping up to high (it tends to get loud and annoying when its running up high) and it never affected my FPS or gameplay in any way. Which does make you wonder, why is it using the CPU so much if reducing the cores its using makes no difference to the game.
In this fashion they can make qualified decisions weighted towards developing graphical upgrades for the bulk of their playerbases' capabilities.
This might not be improved by either the cpu or gpu. When you pull up any of that information it is network driven. If it were client driven we would not have had that inventory lag issue where it takes a while to register any time we moved gear back and forth so to me that indicates that all that info server side.
on any map we go to there can be up to 75 people with their character customizations, character info, location, movement, ect have to be send to our machine to be calculated and rendered. I'm pretty sure the when you open your inventory there is burst data that hits your computer that means extra calculations and load time to get images off the hard drive that pulls time away from the graphics engine.
Yes, we do have metrics for what cards people are using. When I'm telling you we need to support low end cards, I'm talking about laptop built in cards and the like. Geforce 7800's are kind of our medium band. And there is a SIGNIFICANT portion of our playerbase that use low-mid cards. We can't just toss them aside in favor of high end. Trust me, there are times when I wish we could, many things would be easier if we were focused only on high end. This is one reason that developing for a console (over the PC market) is nice. You have a static, set hardware to run on, and you don't have to worry about anything else. We don't have that luxury.
If they are already not upgrading to better graphics cards, adding tessellation or fancier shadows would not be enough of a draw to make people upgrade.
True, but it would put a big smile on the faces that has an high/top-end graphics card/system
Imagine all the extra details you could get on the ground, on ships, interior etc etc by adding tessellation to the game.
And if fancier shadows would fix the issues where only your head casts a shadow on some of the ground missions (the shadow is drawn from bellow the ground) I would welcome that as well.
Fleet Admiral Enterprise-D
STO is the only game that I get Pixelation and flickering textures in space, Low-Res Artifacts when Looking down some corridors (corrupted shaders?) etc.
STO also pushes my GPU 5^C Hotter than even BF3.
you have no idea what I'm talking about.
Many of the people playing STO are likely casual players, for whom gaming is a secondary or tertiary priority on their computer, which was most likely bought for work/school/internet/email etc, tasks which don't require high-end graphics power.
There's also the fact that many may be playing for the story and aren't concerned with graphics, they're content with how the game performs on their current hardware, and seen no reason to upgrade.
Commander, Starfleet Corps of Engineers • 7th Fleet
Commanding Officer, U.S.S. HEART OF OAK • NX-1759-B • Odyssey class Star Cruiser ( Lexington Tactical Configuration))
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Q: What are the system requirements?
A: The minimum system requirements are:
OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz or AMD Athlon X2 3800+
Memory: Memory: 1GB RAM
Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 / ATI Radeon X1800 / Intel HD Graphics
Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard
DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher
HDD: 10GB Free Disk Space
Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required
Granted this was made 3 years ago, but come on. You left out the commodore 64 :rolleyes:
1 GB of ram, this cracks me up.
So what happens when you have a player that?s using a Intel HD GFX card on a 1920x1080p or greater resolution? Slow. Why do manufactures fail to also put in screen resolution is beyond me?
Give people a year to upgrade then change your minimum system requirements.
i agree that the UI is eating too many Frames per Second.
it goes as far that i was able to measure a difference in frames when i just switched ONE more row in the power tray on and off.
-> i have disabled everything in the HUD options that isn't absolutely needed for gameplay like names or boxes of friendly ships, this gives more of a boost to the framerate than reducing any kind of view distance.
on that note i wouldn't mind if the view distance sliders would go a bit farther for high end systems.
on my Full HD screen i can see the ships swap from high to low poly models often while they are still rather big in view (with maxed slider of course).
there are some other things that can kill the framerate badly, like lots of grass that throws shadows,
for example in the KDF mission "Alpha", shadows OR high detail objects OFF and the mission runs with 60, but both ON and it's a Slideshow.
also seen that happen in random exploration sector maps...
oh and Taco,
Consoles might have a fix set of hardware to work with, but from my experience barely any Xbox 360 or PS3 game delivers more than 30 FPS @ 720p ,
and they suffer from Framedrops just like a PC does.
Consoles might sound easier from a Developer perspective on first glance, but the results tell me that the effort is rarely taken to actually optimize a console game to run perfect.
The Problem with that is, on the PC if something runs crappy i can throw more hardware at the problem and it will eventually go away at some point, on Consoles the performance never changes, if a game has bad FPS / resolution, it will always be like that.
LTS, here since...when did this game launch again?
Thank you for the detailed information, so if Tessellation is out, how about other things like using DirectCompute for lighting and shadows ?
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This is incorrect. The UI renders using the GPU. The UI is slow due to some internal scripts that affect UI logic, but has nothing to do with the rendering. When sections of the UI are hidden or closed, the scripts for that section do not execute. The UI for the inventory is particularly expensive due to (I believe) some scripts that run per inventory cell each frame.
Fresh meat! JK
I prefer "disillusioned and shellshocked veteran of the forums who hasn't come back since before the Cryptic/PW account switch". =P
But I suppose as long as there are still people who blame the UI performance issues on the graphics system, there is still a need for this grizzled old veteran.
If this is correct, perhaps some time should be spent on reducing the amount of scripts being run, and slowing down the overall framerate? I can run single-player games (and even some multiplayer games), at much higher settings with better framerate and better graphics. And yes, that includes most MMOs. On STO, I struggle to have a playable framerate at settings above Medium.
Reducing scripts means expanding exploits, generally.
That's part of what makes an MMO computationally costlier in certain ways.
Ideally as few processes as possible are hosted on the user's computer. Instead, events get determined by a server that Cryptic rents and fed back to players via scripts.
Now... An FPS can get by with handling more of the business of running the game client side. But an FPS doesn't ordinarily have to deal with issues like currency or item duping.
ANYTHING that gets done clientside is something I could figure out a way to exploit. And serverside validation scripts wouldn't stop me necessarily because then all I'd need to do is to trick those scripts into firing inappropriately.
For example:
Say an MMO has a server script that validates currency transactions. So it rejects increases sent by a modded client and resets the variable.
Okay, then maybe what I do if I'm Joe Hacker is actually send a corrupted data packet that LOWERS my total money. And maybe the server script says, "No. You can't change your total" and also says "You should have one more than that." And if the priority of those functions is wrong, attempting to hack my currency total lower actually increases it by using the failsafe against itself.
That's probably something most devs would think about. But the problem is that they can't just ban anyone whose client sends corrupted or garbled data and there is bound to be a place where a validation script would be highly exploitable. So it's better to have all aspects of gameplay happen serverside and make my client a big fancy representation of stuff that happens entirely on the server. So that all my client does is graphics... and a minimum amount of that lest you have an invasion of fifty foot monsters like you had when a few client hackers got loose in City of heroes and TRIBBLE their costume variables. So ideally, even costume only elements are something you want out of the client's control.
Whereas in a shooter? Eh. Less of an issue.