@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
-PCI-e x16
-Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7400RPM HDD (Upgrading mid next year to Seagate Barracuda 2TB)
-Windows 7 X64 Ultimate SP1 (Not like;y to upgrade to Win10 because of reports of issues withe the OS)
-Coolermaster Extrem Power Plus 600W Power supply
-Coolermaster Hyper Evo 212 Core heatsink
-Coolermastre CM Storm Cabinet.
@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
-PCI-e x16
-Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7400RPM HDD (Upgrading mid next year to Seagate Barracuda 2TB)
-Windows 7 X64 Ultimate SP1 (Not like;y to upgrade to Win10 because of reports of issues withe the OS)
-Coolermaster Extrem Power Plus 600W Power supply
-Coolermaster Hyper Evo 212 Core heatsink
-Coolermastre CM Storm Cabinet.
Looks like that card supports DX12 and with the backward compatibility it should not be a problem.
As for buying in India, have you considered webshops? I have noticed that it pays off to order east or west (in my case UK or Germany) from time to time. Gotta keep exchange rate and shipping costs under advisement, but most of the time it pays off.
Heck, sometimes it's cheaper to order in Australia with the shipping than at the PC store around the corner.
This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
...Why is the lighting 2.0 tab disabled? after all it running on dx11.
My pc cpu is intel(R) core(TM) i3-3229 cpu @ 3.30 ghz and graphic NVDIA GeForce 210. I am running using dx11, i think my cpu is ok but is my graphic card ok?
Hi Sarah,
The GeForce 210 is a DirectX 10.1 GPU. Lighting 2.0 requires a DirectX 11 GPU. Therefore, the reason why Lighting 2.0 is disabled is because that GPU does not support DirectX 11. You should be fine. However, if you want better performance and the ability to turn on Lighting 2.0, then you need to upgrade to a modern GPU; the GeForce 210 was released some time back in 2009.
Well, swapped from DX9 to DX 11 last night, ingame, making a few minor settings tweaks...exited out of the game, then restarted to make sure the changes stuck....
Stayed on for about an hour, doing my usual stuff(a few more Phoenix boxes, Q's Winter stuff) with no noticeable hiccups or performance degradation...kept renderscale set to .98(and Lighting 2.0 still off), and I seem to be doing allright...seems like I might've panicked for nothing...I hope....
@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
You should be fine for STO.
However, the C2Q Q8400 is a rather old CPU. If you are not going to upgrade it, then I would say that you should not get anything more powerful than nVidia GTX 960. Due to it low performance compared to modern CPUs, the Q8400 will bottleneck a GTX 960.
I can't say how bad the bottleneck will be but I would guess there is probably a 15% - 20% bottleneck (meaning lower performance) compared to the GTX 960 being paired up with a more modern Core i5-6500 CPU.
My PC uses an AMD Radeon HD 7350 video card, with 1 GB RAM. It does support DirectX 11. As a matter of fact, I can play many recent games.
Yet, whenever I try to play STO, the game crashes within 30 minutes (most often right after I click Engage).
There was an issue after Lighting 2.0 was launched that reset the graphic settings for the game. I am currently at work so there is no way for me to tell you exactly which of the option tabs you need to go to, but it is definitely in the "basic" graphic tab. There is a setting that tells STO how much VRAM to use. I think it is usually set to auto, but after Lighting 2.0 went live, it was set to the lowest setting... something like 64MB or 128MB. Every so often the game would crash because of that.
Since my GPU definitely has more 1GB of VRAM, I changed the setting to something like "1,024MB+" (effectively 1GB+) and that fixed the crashes.
My PC uses an AMD Radeon HD 7350 video card, with 1 GB RAM. It does support DirectX 11. As a matter of fact, I can play many recent games.
Yet, whenever I try to play STO, the game crashes within 30 minutes (most often right after I click Engage).
There was an issue after Lighting 2.0 was launched that reset the graphic settings for the game. I am currently at work so there is no way for me to tell you exactly which of the option tabs you need to go to, but it is definitely in the "basic" graphic tab. There is a setting that tells STO how much VRAM to use. I think it is usually set to auto, but after Lighting 2.0 went live, it was set to the lowest setting... something like 64MB or 128MB. Every so often the game would crash because of that.
Since my GPU definitely has more 1GB of VRAM, I changed the setting to something like "1,024MB+" (effectively 1GB+) and that fixed the crashes.
You think that'd work on an Intel GPU?
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I have a 390, but your support for AMD is horrible. I wasn't able to play on DX11 for a whole year on sto without having crashes. I had to keep playing on DX9 on a top of the line card. Sad. Right now I can't even get in the game without going into safe mode. It says my new drivers are old and when I try going forward it crashes. Fix your support before you off an api that some rely on.
My PC uses an AMD Radeon HD 7350 video card, with 1 GB RAM. It does support DirectX 11. As a matter of fact, I can play many recent games.
Yet, whenever I try to play STO, the game crashes within 30 minutes (most often right after I click Engage).
There was an issue after Lighting 2.0 was launched that reset the graphic settings for the game. I am currently at work so there is no way for me to tell you exactly which of the option tabs you need to go to, but it is definitely in the "basic" graphic tab. There is a setting that tells STO how much VRAM to use. I think it is usually set to auto, but after Lighting 2.0 went live, it was set to the lowest setting... something like 64MB or 128MB. Every so often the game would crash because of that.
Since my GPU definitely has more 1GB of VRAM, I changed the setting to something like "1,024MB+" (effectively 1GB+) and that fixed the crashes.
You think that'd work on an Intel GPU?
I am not sure how much video RAM an Intel graphics core has, I am guessing 128MB to at most 256MB. Integrated graphic cores relies on "shared memory" which basically means it uses your system RAM if the game requires more RAM than what the graphics core has.
Intel HD graphics can generally use up to 2GB, but only if that amount of RAM is available for the graphics core to use. If your PC / laptop only has 4GB of RAM, then I would guess it has access to less than 1GB of VRAM. Windows likely uses something like 1.2GB to 1.5GB of RAM, STO uses up to 2GB of RAM (because it is a 32-bit program). With nothing else running that means roughly 3.2GB to 3.5GB is being used which leaves 500MB to 800MB of RAM available to the Intel HD graphics core.
If you only have 4GB of RAM and assuming it is a single stick of RAM, then I highly recommend that you install another stick of 4GB RAM. That means the Intel HD graphics can address up to 2GB of RAM in total if necessary. Additionally, that allows the RAM to run at full speed rather than half speed. That can generally improve game performance by 10% - 15%, but the actual gain depends on the specific game.
Some Intel HD graphic cores do not support DX11 so you cannot turn on Lighting 2.0. For example, I have a 5 year old laptop with a Core i5-2410m CPU and an Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics core. I do not have the option to activate Lighting 2.0. Besides performance is rather sluggish when I tested STO at 1366x768 resolution that activating Lighting 2.0 would have may the crawl like a slideshow.
Yeah, I think the dedicated RAM is 128MB. (It's been a while since I checked, though.)
8GB RAM, DX12 runtime with hardware support for DX11.1 - the DX11 setting lets me run Lighting 2.0, but it takes ages to compile the shader cache with or without Lighting 2.0, and it loves to crash at random intervals (also regardless of lighting type, but seems to occur more frequently with 2.0 - which is somewhat annoying, because I rather like 2.0 and didn't like it when I had to switch back to DX9).
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I tested Lighting 2.0 on the Intel HD 4400 (laptop) and Intel HD 4600 (desktop) graphics core. While STO is more or less playable @ 1600x900 in both instances, Lighting 2.0 does cause performance issues. For example, I tested BotSE and found that when certain abilities are activate (either me or others), the frame rate plummeted down to the teens or perhaps single digit. It's more apparent on the laptop since the Intel HD 4400 is not as powerful as the Intel HD 4600.
I am sure if I tweaked the graphic settings I could have made STO more "playable", but I didn't tinker much round with the settings since I have a dedicated GPU in both machines.
@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
You should be fine for STO.
However, the C2Q Q8400 is a rather old CPU. If you are not going to upgrade it, then I would say that you should not get anything more powerful than nVidia GTX 960. Due to it low performance compared to modern CPUs, the Q8400 will bottleneck a GTX 960.
I can't say how bad the bottleneck will be but I would guess there is probably a 15% - 20% bottleneck (meaning lower performance) compared to the GTX 960 being paired up with a more modern Core i5-6500 CPU.
I agree with these comments. Except i'd probably say your GTX560 is about as powerful as you should go vid card wise. I was cpu limited when I had that same cpu along with a GTX285 if memory serves. And a GTX560 which I've also owned is better than a 285 performance wise. Swap the mobo and cpu out first.
I tested Lighting 2.0 on the Intel HD 4400 (laptop) and Intel HD 4600 (desktop) graphics core. While STO is more or less playable @ 1600x900 in both instances, Lighting 2.0 does cause performance issues. For example, I tested BotSE and found that when certain abilities are activate (either me or others), the frame rate plummeted down to the teens or perhaps single digit. It's more apparent on the laptop since the Intel HD 4400 is not as powerful as the Intel HD 4600.
I am sure if I tweaked the graphic settings I could have made STO more "playable", but I didn't tinker much round with the settings since I have a dedicated GPU in both machines.
Pentium G3258 - it just says 'Intel HD Graphics' for the GPU.
It's pretty decent - I can have fairly good graphics in most situations in most games, though some STO maps will need me to drop the resolution scale to 0.5 in order to run with any kind of usable framerate (the same solution applies for instances where I need my framerate to reliably exceed 30 or something, like PvP or some of the more active ground PvE queues).
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I have a 390, but your support for AMD is horrible. I wasn't able to play on DX11 for a whole year on sto without having crashes. I had to keep playing on DX9 on a top of the line card. Sad. Right now I can't even get in the game without going into safe mode. It says my new drivers are old and when I try going forward it crashes. Fix your support before you off an api that some rely on.
Turn shadows down to medium. I have an R390 as well and exclusively use AMD video cards. I had the same issue with my 7950 and 5850. Cryptic introduced the issue with the Devidian arcs release and it has been plaguing the game ever since. Hoping they will fix it, especially have 4+ years is wishful thinking, but we can all hope.
Pentium G3258 - it just says 'Intel HD Graphics' for the GPU.
It's pretty decent - I can have fairly good graphics in most situations in most games, though some STO maps will need me to drop the resolution scale to 0.5 in order to run with any kind of usable framerate (the same solution applies for instances where I need my framerate to reliably exceed 30 or something, like PvP or some of the more active ground PvE queues).
I think the game is crashing because you GPU is pretty weak and likely unable to keep up with the demands of the game when too many effects are in play. The Pentium G3258 is an entry level Haswell 5th generation CPU with a weak integrated graphic core. The performance of it's graphics core is only a little better than the Intel HD 3000 graphics core found in 2nd generation Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs which does not support DX11.
The effects of some abilities may be too much for the Intel HD (Haswell) graphics core to handle regardless of how much RAM it has access to which could cause the game crash. I would say that it would be best if you can afford to buy a dedicated GPU and the desktop PC has room to install a budget dedicated GPU, then you should do so. That also depends on how much power (watts / amps) your power supply can provide as well; specifically on the +12v rail.
@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
-PCI-e x16
-Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7400RPM HDD (Upgrading mid next year to Seagate Barracuda 2TB)
-Windows 7 X64 Ultimate SP1 (Not like;y to upgrade to Win10 because of reports of issues withe the OS)
-Coolermaster Extrem Power Plus 600W Power supply
-Coolermaster Hyper Evo 212 Core heatsink
-Coolermastre CM Storm Cabinet.
Looks like that card supports DX12 and with the backward compatibility it should not be a problem.
As for buying in India, have you considered webshops? I have noticed that it pays off to order east or west (in my case UK or Germany) from time to time. Gotta keep exchange rate and shipping costs under advisement, but most of the time it pays off.
Heck, sometimes it's cheaper to order in Australia with the shipping than at the PC store around the corner.
Damn!!! Thought it was only till DX11..Thanxs for the heads up!!!
@ambassadorkael Am I gonna be ok for the foreseeable future (2017-2018) in STO??
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
You should be fine for STO.
However, the C2Q Q8400 is a rather old CPU. If you are not going to upgrade it, then I would say that you should not get anything more powerful than nVidia GTX 960. Due to it low performance compared to modern CPUs, the Q8400 will bottleneck a GTX 960.
I can't say how bad the bottleneck will be but I would guess there is probably a 15% - 20% bottleneck (meaning lower performance) compared to the GTX 960 being paired up with a more modern Core i5-6500 CPU.
I agree with these comments. Except i'd probably say your GTX560 is about as powerful as you should go vid card wise. I was cpu limited when I had that same cpu along with a GTX285 if memory serves. And a GTX560 which I've also owned is better than a 285 performance wise. Swap the mobo and cpu out first.
Yup, thanx..Will swap the mobo then, although its gonna cost me close to 20k here..
The effects of some abilities may be too much for the Intel HD (Haswell) graphics core to handle regardless of how much RAM it has access to which could cause the game crash. I would say that it would be best if you can afford to buy a dedicated GPU and the desktop PC has room to install a budget dedicated GPU, then you should do so. That also depends on how much power (watts / amps) your power supply can provide as well; specifically on the +12v rail.
Unfortunately, with my PC budget being equivalent to 'zero' unless it's an emergency (for example, the previous PC dying), I don't expect to get a new GPU any time soon - or a new anything, for that matter.
Anyway, this isn't a matter of 'some ability crashes the game', it's a matter of 'the game crashes at random intervals and locations as it sees fit'. Sometimes I'm wandering around Andoria, other times I'm helping the Lukari, or running around ESD... the only common element is running the game in DX11 mode.
It is possible that it is a graphics driver issue with DX11.
I have a secondary STO account that is free to play only that I am playing on a 5 year old laptop with a Core i5-2410m and an integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics core (supports DX10.1). Since the Crystalline Entity Event started I have been playing my secondary account pretty often 1 or 2 hours per day. I played sporatically since the end of the Risa Event.
Thus far, I have not encounter any crashes. However, on my desktop and other laptop (both with dedicated DX11 GPUs) that I use to play my primary account, I have encounter a few crashes, but it does not happen very often.
I have only tested Lighting 2.0 using the Intel HD 4400 and HD 4600 for a short period of time. Not enough to encounter any crashes.
So you gonna drop dx9 and force dx11, despite the fact that no AMD card will work under windows 10 with the latest drivers, with STO?
nice work
What?! The game may crash if you have shadows on high but I wouldn't go as far as saying that no AMD card works, especially on Windows 10, with the current drivers for STO. I am running the latest drivers on Windows 10 and the game works fine, as long as I don't enable shadows to high. Sure, it sucks to have to reduce the shadow setting to make the game playable for longer than a few minutes, but that doesn't make STO unplayable and it sure doesn't mean that, "no AMD card will work under Windows 10 with the latest AMD drivers, with STO".
I cannot believe it has been suggested by posters that they require compensation to upgrade their computers to play video games.
And you thought the 90s were long over, eh?
EDIT: Oops, misread you. Still, the idea of upgrading your computer for a game is something people seem to have forgotten. Or never experienced. It used to be that a new Wing Commander meant buying a new computer. Not that I ever really played Wing Commander.
Star Trek Online Advancement: You start with lowbie gear, you end with Lobi gear.
It is possible that it is a graphics driver issue with DX11.
I have a secondary STO account that is free to play only that I am playing on a 5 year old laptop with a Core i5-2410m and an integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics core (supports DX10.1). Since the Crystalline Entity Event started I have been playing my secondary account pretty often 1 or 2 hours per day. I played sporatically since the end of the Risa Event.
Thus far, I have not encounter any crashes. However, on my desktop and other laptop (both with dedicated DX11 GPUs) that I use to play my primary account, I have encounter a few crashes, but it does not happen very often.
I have only tested Lighting 2.0 using the Intel HD 4400 and HD 4600 for a short period of time. Not enough to encounter any crashes.
Given the AMD complaints in the posts after yours, and their similarity to some of the things I've noticed (namely, high shadow quality making things worse)... could it be that the drivers for Win10 are causing trouble?
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Given the AMD complaints in the posts after yours, and their similarity to some of the things I've noticed (namely, high shadow quality making things worse)... could it be that the drivers for Win10 are causing trouble?
Anything can be possible...
There could be bugs within the Lighting 2.0 engine or it could be things that have been poorly implemented which can cause crashes or operate inefficiently. It could be driver issues or STO / Win 10 support for those drivers. Unfortunately, troubleshooting problems in PC games can be extremely difficult due to the myriad of possible combinations of APUs / CPUs, motherboards, RAM, GPUs (dedicated and integrated) and a whole other assortment of things. The main advantage of consoles is that all consoles of a specific generation like the PS4 uses the same hardware which makes games designed from the ground up (not ported) much easier to design. That does not mean fixing bugs in console games designed from the ground up is a piece of cake though. The PS3's with it's IBM Cell processor was notoriously difficult to develop games for. I suppose on paper it was supposed offer a lot of flexibility, but in reality it seems game development seemed to be rather nightmarish at least in the beginning.
On the PC you still have people running the game with hardware dating back to 2008 or even before. During that time not only has Intel released 8 generations of CPUs, but within each generation there are probably around 15 - 20 different CPUs, then there's AMD's APUs and CPUs that needs to be taken into consideration as well. Plus the multitude of GPUs from AMD and nVidia.
While dropping Windows XP and DX9 does suck for some people, for any game developer it is a move in the right direction because archaic technologies are being jettisoned. That can lead to improved compatibility for the remaining technologies since coding that made the game playable on older tech and OS could cause performance issues for newer tech and OS. Personally, I would have dropped support for Windows Vista, but I suppose the fundamental core of the OS is close enough to Win 7 that is being supported.
AMD has had issues with driver support that is not quite up to the standards of nVidia, but from what I have read, they have been improving the quality of their drivers, if not the frequency of how often new drivers are released.
It's not really that easy to point to a single source of the problem because the PC gaming industry is an ever changing landscape whether it is new hardware rolling out every 9 to 12 months or fundamental changes that Microsoft makes to their operating system with each new release.
It's pretty simple. I have laptops in the house. They're not ancient, they all run Windows 10, but they aren't new either.
If STO no longer runs on a particular machine, it's done. If it stops working on my personal laptop, no more STO for me and I will finally be in a position to consider cutting the Windows cord for good.
I'm not replacing expensive, useful computers just because of a *game*. It works or it doesn't work.
I get why they're changing the requirements. They can't pull in newer users and serious gamers if they don't provide a modern graphics experience. No hard feelings. It just is what it is and hopefully the hit won't be too bad.
Comments
-Intel Core2Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
-Intel DG43GT Desktop Board
-Nvidia GTX560 1GB (Upgrading mid next year to a GTX700/900 series..No budget for a GTX1000 series)
-PCI-e x16
-Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7400RPM HDD (Upgrading mid next year to Seagate Barracuda 2TB)
-Windows 7 X64 Ultimate SP1 (Not like;y to upgrade to Win10 because of reports of issues withe the OS)
-Coolermaster Extrem Power Plus 600W Power supply
-Coolermaster Hyper Evo 212 Core heatsink
-Coolermastre CM Storm Cabinet.
Things in India are a bit expensive to buy!!
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-560/specifications
Looks like that card supports DX12 and with the backward compatibility it should not be a problem.
As for buying in India, have you considered webshops? I have noticed that it pays off to order east or west (in my case UK or Germany) from time to time. Gotta keep exchange rate and shipping costs under advisement, but most of the time it pays off.
Heck, sometimes it's cheaper to order in Australia with the shipping than at the PC store around the corner.
Hi Sarah,
The GeForce 210 is a DirectX 10.1 GPU. Lighting 2.0 requires a DirectX 11 GPU. Therefore, the reason why Lighting 2.0 is disabled is because that GPU does not support DirectX 11. You should be fine. However, if you want better performance and the ability to turn on Lighting 2.0, then you need to upgrade to a modern GPU; the GeForce 210 was released some time back in 2009.
Stayed on for about an hour, doing my usual stuff(a few more Phoenix boxes, Q's Winter stuff) with no noticeable hiccups or performance degradation...kept renderscale set to .98(and Lighting 2.0 still off), and I seem to be doing allright...seems like I might've panicked for nothing...I hope....
You should be fine for STO.
However, the C2Q Q8400 is a rather old CPU. If you are not going to upgrade it, then I would say that you should not get anything more powerful than nVidia GTX 960. Due to it low performance compared to modern CPUs, the Q8400 will bottleneck a GTX 960.
I can't say how bad the bottleneck will be but I would guess there is probably a 15% - 20% bottleneck (meaning lower performance) compared to the GTX 960 being paired up with a more modern Core i5-6500 CPU.
There was an issue after Lighting 2.0 was launched that reset the graphic settings for the game. I am currently at work so there is no way for me to tell you exactly which of the option tabs you need to go to, but it is definitely in the "basic" graphic tab. There is a setting that tells STO how much VRAM to use. I think it is usually set to auto, but after Lighting 2.0 went live, it was set to the lowest setting... something like 64MB or 128MB. Every so often the game would crash because of that.
Since my GPU definitely has more 1GB of VRAM, I changed the setting to something like "1,024MB+" (effectively 1GB+) and that fixed the crashes.
If only. I've been getting that message for over 2 months now, I just don't think it's even a low priority for Cryptic to address.
You think that'd work on an Intel GPU?
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I am not sure how much video RAM an Intel graphics core has, I am guessing 128MB to at most 256MB. Integrated graphic cores relies on "shared memory" which basically means it uses your system RAM if the game requires more RAM than what the graphics core has.
Intel HD graphics can generally use up to 2GB, but only if that amount of RAM is available for the graphics core to use. If your PC / laptop only has 4GB of RAM, then I would guess it has access to less than 1GB of VRAM. Windows likely uses something like 1.2GB to 1.5GB of RAM, STO uses up to 2GB of RAM (because it is a 32-bit program). With nothing else running that means roughly 3.2GB to 3.5GB is being used which leaves 500MB to 800MB of RAM available to the Intel HD graphics core.
If you only have 4GB of RAM and assuming it is a single stick of RAM, then I highly recommend that you install another stick of 4GB RAM. That means the Intel HD graphics can address up to 2GB of RAM in total if necessary. Additionally, that allows the RAM to run at full speed rather than half speed. That can generally improve game performance by 10% - 15%, but the actual gain depends on the specific game.
Some Intel HD graphic cores do not support DX11 so you cannot turn on Lighting 2.0. For example, I have a 5 year old laptop with a Core i5-2410m CPU and an Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics core. I do not have the option to activate Lighting 2.0. Besides performance is rather sluggish when I tested STO at 1366x768 resolution that activating Lighting 2.0 would have may the crawl like a slideshow.
8GB RAM, DX12 runtime with hardware support for DX11.1 - the DX11 setting lets me run Lighting 2.0, but it takes ages to compile the shader cache with or without Lighting 2.0, and it loves to crash at random intervals (also regardless of lighting type, but seems to occur more frequently with 2.0 - which is somewhat annoying, because I rather like 2.0 and didn't like it when I had to switch back to DX9).
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I tested Lighting 2.0 on the Intel HD 4400 (laptop) and Intel HD 4600 (desktop) graphics core. While STO is more or less playable @ 1600x900 in both instances, Lighting 2.0 does cause performance issues. For example, I tested BotSE and found that when certain abilities are activate (either me or others), the frame rate plummeted down to the teens or perhaps single digit. It's more apparent on the laptop since the Intel HD 4400 is not as powerful as the Intel HD 4600.
I am sure if I tweaked the graphic settings I could have made STO more "playable", but I didn't tinker much round with the settings since I have a dedicated GPU in both machines.
I agree with these comments. Except i'd probably say your GTX560 is about as powerful as you should go vid card wise. I was cpu limited when I had that same cpu along with a GTX285 if memory serves. And a GTX560 which I've also owned is better than a 285 performance wise. Swap the mobo and cpu out first.
Pentium G3258 - it just says 'Intel HD Graphics' for the GPU.
It's pretty decent - I can have fairly good graphics in most situations in most games, though some STO maps will need me to drop the resolution scale to 0.5 in order to run with any kind of usable framerate (the same solution applies for instances where I need my framerate to reliably exceed 30 or something, like PvP or some of the more active ground PvE queues).
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Turn shadows down to medium. I have an R390 as well and exclusively use AMD video cards. I had the same issue with my 7950 and 5850. Cryptic introduced the issue with the Devidian arcs release and it has been plaguing the game ever since. Hoping they will fix it, especially have 4+ years is wishful thinking, but we can all hope.
10 mins in game booom crashed...
after driver updates etc....
I now can not even get in the game without safe mode
I think the game is crashing because you GPU is pretty weak and likely unable to keep up with the demands of the game when too many effects are in play. The Pentium G3258 is an entry level Haswell 5th generation CPU with a weak integrated graphic core. The performance of it's graphics core is only a little better than the Intel HD 3000 graphics core found in 2nd generation Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs which does not support DX11.
The effects of some abilities may be too much for the Intel HD (Haswell) graphics core to handle regardless of how much RAM it has access to which could cause the game crash. I would say that it would be best if you can afford to buy a dedicated GPU and the desktop PC has room to install a budget dedicated GPU, then you should do so. That also depends on how much power (watts / amps) your power supply can provide as well; specifically on the +12v rail.
Damn!!! Thought it was only till DX11..Thanxs for the heads up!!!
Yup, thanx..Will swap the mobo then, although its gonna cost me close to 20k here..
Adu-Uss Firefox NCC-93425-F (LVL 65 FED AoY ENG) UR/VR MKXV Fleet Intel Assault Cruiser (July 2016)
Jean-Uss Seratoga Ravenna (LVL 60 FED Delta ENG) UC/R MKVI Bajoran Escort (April 2018)
Dubsa-RRW Mnaudh (LVL 50 FED allied ROM Delta ENG) Warbird (May 2018)
Marop-IKS Orunthi (LVL 50 KNG Delta ENG) BoP (May 2018)
Kanak'lan-TRIBBLE (LVL 65 DOM Gamma ENG) TRIBBLE (June 2018)
Unfortunately, with my PC budget being equivalent to 'zero' unless it's an emergency (for example, the previous PC dying), I don't expect to get a new GPU any time soon - or a new anything, for that matter.
Anyway, this isn't a matter of 'some ability crashes the game', it's a matter of 'the game crashes at random intervals and locations as it sees fit'. Sometimes I'm wandering around Andoria, other times I'm helping the Lukari, or running around ESD... the only common element is running the game in DX11 mode.
I actually posted about the specific errors I was encountering a while back, in a thread discussing the update: http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/1223859/graphics-update/p5
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I have a secondary STO account that is free to play only that I am playing on a 5 year old laptop with a Core i5-2410m and an integrated Intel HD 3000 graphics core (supports DX10.1). Since the Crystalline Entity Event started I have been playing my secondary account pretty often 1 or 2 hours per day. I played sporatically since the end of the Risa Event.
Thus far, I have not encounter any crashes. However, on my desktop and other laptop (both with dedicated DX11 GPUs) that I use to play my primary account, I have encounter a few crashes, but it does not happen very often.
I have only tested Lighting 2.0 using the Intel HD 4400 and HD 4600 for a short period of time. Not enough to encounter any crashes.
nice work
What?! The game may crash if you have shadows on high but I wouldn't go as far as saying that no AMD card works, especially on Windows 10, with the current drivers for STO. I am running the latest drivers on Windows 10 and the game works fine, as long as I don't enable shadows to high. Sure, it sucks to have to reduce the shadow setting to make the game playable for longer than a few minutes, but that doesn't make STO unplayable and it sure doesn't mean that, "no AMD card will work under Windows 10 with the latest AMD drivers, with STO".
I am using the latest drivers for the Radeon HD 8850m in my laptop, but I need to double check if I am running DX9 or DX11 in Win 10 when I get home.
EDIT: Oops, misread you. Still, the idea of upgrading your computer for a game is something people seem to have forgotten. Or never experienced. It used to be that a new Wing Commander meant buying a new computer.
Given the AMD complaints in the posts after yours, and their similarity to some of the things I've noticed (namely, high shadow quality making things worse)... could it be that the drivers for Win10 are causing trouble?
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
I have a GTX Titan, but I've had it for awhile.
Wiki was no help.
I discovered that Nvidia control panel would not open!?
Bad driver install, crappy GeForce Experience. Used a manual install using info from GPU-Z ( thanks for link)
My Launcher did a quick update I think and looks normal no warning.
I guess your video card passed muster then
Anything can be possible...
There could be bugs within the Lighting 2.0 engine or it could be things that have been poorly implemented which can cause crashes or operate inefficiently. It could be driver issues or STO / Win 10 support for those drivers. Unfortunately, troubleshooting problems in PC games can be extremely difficult due to the myriad of possible combinations of APUs / CPUs, motherboards, RAM, GPUs (dedicated and integrated) and a whole other assortment of things. The main advantage of consoles is that all consoles of a specific generation like the PS4 uses the same hardware which makes games designed from the ground up (not ported) much easier to design. That does not mean fixing bugs in console games designed from the ground up is a piece of cake though. The PS3's with it's IBM Cell processor was notoriously difficult to develop games for. I suppose on paper it was supposed offer a lot of flexibility, but in reality it seems game development seemed to be rather nightmarish at least in the beginning.
On the PC you still have people running the game with hardware dating back to 2008 or even before. During that time not only has Intel released 8 generations of CPUs, but within each generation there are probably around 15 - 20 different CPUs, then there's AMD's APUs and CPUs that needs to be taken into consideration as well. Plus the multitude of GPUs from AMD and nVidia.
While dropping Windows XP and DX9 does suck for some people, for any game developer it is a move in the right direction because archaic technologies are being jettisoned. That can lead to improved compatibility for the remaining technologies since coding that made the game playable on older tech and OS could cause performance issues for newer tech and OS. Personally, I would have dropped support for Windows Vista, but I suppose the fundamental core of the OS is close enough to Win 7 that is being supported.
AMD has had issues with driver support that is not quite up to the standards of nVidia, but from what I have read, they have been improving the quality of their drivers, if not the frequency of how often new drivers are released.
It's not really that easy to point to a single source of the problem because the PC gaming industry is an ever changing landscape whether it is new hardware rolling out every 9 to 12 months or fundamental changes that Microsoft makes to their operating system with each new release.
If STO no longer runs on a particular machine, it's done. If it stops working on my personal laptop, no more STO for me and I will finally be in a position to consider cutting the Windows cord for good.
I'm not replacing expensive, useful computers just because of a *game*. It works or it doesn't work.
I get why they're changing the requirements. They can't pull in newer users and serious gamers if they don't provide a modern graphics experience. No hard feelings. It just is what it is and hopefully the hit won't be too bad.
There's always Minecraft