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stee1max
Member Posts: 227 Arc User
Hello fellow Captains,
MAYDAY!
A short backstory of my hiatus to begin with. Unfortunately, the PC I used to play on had a critical warp core breach, resulting in EPS conduits being turned into a pile of charcoal. Captain's bridge got a devastating hit and the screen turned black, permanently. No more exploring new frontiers.
Due to the nature of my occupation I can't afford to spare time on PC gaming, hence the need of a mobile machine arises.
This is a shout out to existing laptop users. Can anyone please share their combat reports: any performance marks, your specs, and resolution of the screen. FPS and settings are much appreciated.
Just before you are going to give me a lecture and point at the downsides of this setup, I have to explain myself: there is no need in any. I'm certainly familiar with the stuff, but not the way it's gonna synergies with STO. The game is finicky to computer specs, and I'd love to hear out the actual reports.
Also, I'm planning to grab some cheap TRIBBLE, meaning nothing fancy: 1366x768 to 1600x900, 15+ inches display, preferably quad core AMD A8 or Intel Ivy Bridge dual core counterparts with HT, and some discrete entry level graphics (NV 630/720/820+ or AMD HD 7 or 8 series, potentially rebranded 200/300). A SATA3 SSD will be a must, so that is definitely one to plug in, but separately.
I'm not looking forward to crank all the graphical settings up: low LODs, high textures, lightning 2. FPS at hubs must be over 60, there is no hope for such a luxury in combat (looking at you, CCA) and while there is UI wide open, which is mostly junk performance.
Tldr version. Message me with you specs and FPS, and screenshots (to measure scaling on lowres), so I can figure out what to look for.
Thanks Captains, dismissed.
MAYDAY!
A short backstory of my hiatus to begin with. Unfortunately, the PC I used to play on had a critical warp core breach, resulting in EPS conduits being turned into a pile of charcoal. Captain's bridge got a devastating hit and the screen turned black, permanently. No more exploring new frontiers.
Due to the nature of my occupation I can't afford to spare time on PC gaming, hence the need of a mobile machine arises.
This is a shout out to existing laptop users. Can anyone please share their combat reports: any performance marks, your specs, and resolution of the screen. FPS and settings are much appreciated.
Just before you are going to give me a lecture and point at the downsides of this setup, I have to explain myself: there is no need in any. I'm certainly familiar with the stuff, but not the way it's gonna synergies with STO. The game is finicky to computer specs, and I'd love to hear out the actual reports.
Also, I'm planning to grab some cheap TRIBBLE, meaning nothing fancy: 1366x768 to 1600x900, 15+ inches display, preferably quad core AMD A8 or Intel Ivy Bridge dual core counterparts with HT, and some discrete entry level graphics (NV 630/720/820+ or AMD HD 7 or 8 series, potentially rebranded 200/300). A SATA3 SSD will be a must, so that is definitely one to plug in, but separately.
I'm not looking forward to crank all the graphical settings up: low LODs, high textures, lightning 2. FPS at hubs must be over 60, there is no hope for such a luxury in combat (looking at you, CCA) and while there is UI wide open, which is mostly junk performance.
Tldr version. Message me with you specs and FPS, and screenshots (to measure scaling on lowres), so I can figure out what to look for.
Thanks Captains, dismissed.
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This is from my Core i3 4300T (one higher than Ivy Bridge) lappy at it's native panel resolution, running on the iGPU:
Just an image from another thread I had to hand, more pics in my post here (scroll down): https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1232596/maneuverable-large-ships
Unfortunately, '/showfps 1' doesn't seem to work right, but it's pretty smooth outside of CCA. Red Alerts and most less-effects spammed maps are fine. How well the machine handles the Delta missions with the fancier particle effects/skybox varies by patch, but a quick reduction of renderscale usually gets around it if there's a problem like that. Any 4th gen Core i3 T or higher
should handle the game fine.
As an aside, do not get a Core i ending in a Y, Core M, Pentium/Celeron N3000 series, or Atom, as the integrated graphics on those are horrible, barely handling STO at its lowest settings, even limited to lighting 1.0. I'm on a tablet with an i5 4300Y, and it's closer to the Bay Trail Atom system I used before, and way below what the Core i3 4300T laptop can do with STO. Though, some of that would be mitigated with dedicated graphics, but I don't have experience with those personally. I've done 'Bay Trail' Atom and i5 4300Y personally with STO, the rest of the 'avoid' based on benchmarks in other games.
Yes, no way I'm grabbing soldered CPUs such as usually found in ultrabooks and integrated junk. My budget could be limiting, so that's gotta be a used device.
I use a Dell Latitude 3540 with an i5-4200u, 8GB of RAM and Radeon HD 8850m to play my secondary free to play only STO account. According to Notebookcheck.net, they rank the Radeon HD 8850m to be more powerful than a Nvidia 940mx. See link below; GPUs are ranked in classes in the middle column with Class 1 being the most powerful and what people generally consider "gaming GPUs" for laptops. The Radeon HD 8850m and Nvidia 940mx are ranked towards the bottom of Class 2.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-HD-8850M.87118.0.html
Standing still on Qo'nos in the plaza and facing the Great Hall as seen in the below screenshot, I am getting about 35 FPS using 1366 x 768 and no anti-aliasing. Lighting 2.0 is on, textures and draw distance is high, and shadows are disabled. Changing all 3 detail distances from High to Medium increases the FPS to about 40. Surprisingly, disabling Lighting 2.0 in this instance does not affect FPS.
That's what I was looking for with these fancy screenshots of yours. I will definitely drag draw distance settings all the way down (with the exception of char details, ugly) and measure VRAM usage to set it up accordingly. That proves that a dual core cpu wouldn't be enough.
Did you try it with the shadows enabled, lowest draw distance? Are you certain the discrete card is enforced to boot up with the game? Excuse me for this clarification.
GPU1 - 55%
CPU - 55%
RAM - 3556MB
D3D11 - 35 FPS
GPU1 is the Radeon 8850m. 55% means that the game is only using about 55% of the GPU's potential. When this number is significantly below 100% most of the time it means the game is being limited by the CPU.
Although the CPU states 55% (a few times it goes up to 65%), MSI is actually detecting how mean threads of instructions the CPU can process. The i5-4200u is a dual core CPU with Hyper Threading (HT) which basically means this dual core CPU can process 4 threads. Anything above 50% basically means Windows is using HT for some of the background processes.
RAM show how much RAM is currently being used not just by the game, but everything which means Windows 10 and all of it's background processes along with the game.
D3D11 simply means it is detecting 35 FPS in DirectX 11.
On my desktop and other laptop which both have a quad core i5 CPU (i5-4790k and i5-6300HQ), the CPU usage is typically below 45% and that's during combat.
STO does not use more than two core. As I stated above in my other post, on my desktop and other laptop which both have quad core CPUs the CPU usage is typically below 45% during combat. Out of combat I have seen it drop a low as 25%. The problem is clock speed. The i5-4200u has a max clock speed of 2.6GHz with turbo boost, but that is only if 1 core is being used. With both cores active, the max clock speed is more like 2.3GHz or 2.4GHZ to so that the CPU does not get too hot.
Because the Radeon HD 8850m is only at round 55% when using the above settings at 1366 x 768, that means there is a lot of headroom to improve graphic settings. Bumping up the resolution to 1080p, activating dynamic lightning and using high quality shadows with a max of 3 shadows (only one shadow is being casted on Qo'nos), the FPS does not change. However according to MSI Afterburner, GPU usage goes up to 88%, and CPU usage remains the same.
While the Radeon HD 8850m has 2GB of DDR5 VRAM, only 798MB of VRAM is being used on Qo'Nos at 1080p with the settings below.
Below is what the game looks like when setting all distances to minimum at 1366 x 768. FPS goes go up to about 51 FPS.
The Intel HD 4400 provides about 36 FPS when using the settings in the screenshot for 1366 x 768, but with all 3 draw distances set to minimum instead of high.
900p is way easier to use than 720p. I had to use 720p myself with a old video sender and it was pretty horrible trying to play STO on that, you'll still have to move things around a bit (at least in space) from 1080p, but not too hard to pull off a decent layout.
Ground:
Ground DOffing:
Sector Space, the new ability to have 4 horizontal ability bars helps a bit, IMO:
Tom, glad to confirm I will be fully satisfied with 900p. I was worried a 1080p screen of 15 inches would be just way too much downscaled making it quite difficult to see unless you lean towards, which isn't comfortable in a long run. And 768p, on the other hand, could have issues with scaling and potentially contain grainy effects, depending on the screen. Doubtfully manufacturers are benevolent enough to combine good components and not downgrade the parts in favor of a better screen.