... or does it actually look great?! I only discovered the option today, and I think it makes a nice little upgrade to the visuals, especially with everything cranked up to max on everything else. Game doesn't look half bad at all, and definitely runs smoother for me in DX11 than in DX9 (old Radeon HD5770 vidcard, about 30-35 fps maxed out at 1280x1024). I think it's subtle things like fog, maybe better SSAO, shadows, reflections, stuff like that? Dunno, but I'm sticking with it now.
So, not a complaint, but just a small complement to pass on to the devs!
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Edit: Found it. Did not notice the "troubleshoot" at the bottom @ the gfx options.
Because the speed improvement is definitely not my imagination, the game objectively runs about 15-20% faster for me now.
When playing the game at max detail (basic slider all to the right) i have alot of epileptic shadows from alot of light sources.
The only change was setting Auto/DX11 back to DX9 ... all shadow flickering gone instantly.
Unfortunately, when s7 went live I had to disable dx11 and revert back to dx9 due to performance issues (dx11 is suposedly more efficient than dx9 and should therefore be faster). I began getting lower and less reliable frame rates compared to how it was before s7. Frame rates were lower and the game was stuttering a lot more.
It's a feature that seems to have been worked on for a little while, then abandoned.
Thats actually not STO related, thats related purely to the fact that probably different (and by default often hidden) driver settings like LOD and Anti Aliasing is affecting it. All this 'hidden' settings are acting differently based on DX9 versus DX11, like some are forced in one, or put on auto on the other, and vice versa.
So that explains why DX11 can look different then DX9, better or worse. But like i said, it only requires a special tool that 'unhides' or give you access to these settings (Tools like Nvidia Inspector or the ATI/AMD Equivalent i.e.)
My game looks equally nice as when i set it to DX9 compared to DX11.
You are right about one thing though, DX11 got significantly worse since they released LOR, unfortunately the developers do not acknowledge this problem, I've done different tests on certain areas of the game, and pretty much everywhere my CPU usage almost doubled. I'm pretty sure they messed something up as DX11 was alot more efficient and faster (and less CPU demanding) then after LOR release.
Tried tons of different drivers, the ones i used to use before LoR, no improvement. I hope their DX9ex implementation is at least a bit better when Season 8 hits but I doubt it will be bugless either :C