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AMD Driver issue, crappy coding and incompetence = REQUESTING DEV!
hakaaragorn
Member Posts: 10 Arc User
I have been playing STO since the beginning and have NEVER had a problem running the game until the tail end of last year (submitted a ticket about this on 11/10/2016)
I launched the game after the most recent patch to be welcomed with:
It has been detected that your computer configuration may not be able to run this application.
Your computer appears to be using older drivers for your video card.
This application may run poorly or not at all without updated drivers.
Please update your drivers by visting www.ati.com (this just directs you to www.amd.com by the way).
In some cases such as laptops, you may need to get the latest drivers from your computer manufacturers site.
My current system specs:
My system specs are MORE than enough to run STO at the highest graphics settings and I have the most up to date drivers available from AMD. 16.12.2 is the version that I have currently installed and these run EVERY other game including Titanfall 2 without any problems what so ever.
I do not want to be fobbed off with the reply I got last time which was:
As EVERY ATI/AMD graphics card on the market runs the Crimson driver system this issues needs a resolution. I am not prepared to downgrade the software to one that your system accepts as this would degrade my experiences of other programs that I run.
I have 2 lifetime accounts with Star Trek Online and I have played since it was in BETA. I want to enjoy the game but if you cant fix this I dont see any other choice other than close the account.
I have spoke to tech support a couple of times about this and thankfully they have been open and up front with me and gave me this answer:
I have not included the agent's name that I spoke with about this as I dont want any repercussions to be made against him/her.
This error does not just give a little clump of white text at the bottom right of the screen. On my system it forces me EVERY time I load the game to set up all my graphic settings from the start again. This affects ALL CRYPTIC games not just STO (they are all based on the same engine).
I want to be able to log in to the game and play on the best settings I can with my card and enjoy the game, I dont think that is too much to ask...
From the correspondence I have received from the tech support team, the guys that are doing the game coding are "hoping" that AMD fix it for them so they dont have to do anything that might actually help their customers. God forbid that they might actually have to do something other than fix costume bugs all day...
I launched the game after the most recent patch to be welcomed with:
It has been detected that your computer configuration may not be able to run this application.
Your computer appears to be using older drivers for your video card.
This application may run poorly or not at all without updated drivers.
Please update your drivers by visting www.ati.com (this just directs you to www.amd.com by the way).
In some cases such as laptops, you may need to get the latest drivers from your computer manufacturers site.
My current system specs:
- Sapphire Radeon RX 480 Nitro+ 8GB
- AMD FX 9590 4.7GHz Socket AM3+
- Asus CROSSHAIR V FORMULA-Z 990X
- 32Gb of DDR3 RAM
- Crucial SSD drives for OS and Games
- Windows 10 Pro
My system specs are MORE than enough to run STO at the highest graphics settings and I have the most up to date drivers available from AMD. 16.12.2 is the version that I have currently installed and these run EVERY other game including Titanfall 2 without any problems what so ever.
I do not want to be fobbed off with the reply I got last time which was:
Thank you for contacting us. There is a known compatibility issue with the latest 16.9 and above Crimson drivers and our Cryptic games, where they are reporting either an out of date or incompatible hardware. Our engineers are looking into if this can be resolved on our end, but so far the only way to resolve this is to either ignore the message or roll back to a previous version of the Crimson drivers: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download/desktop/previous?os=Windows 10 - 64 .
As EVERY ATI/AMD graphics card on the market runs the Crimson driver system this issues needs a resolution. I am not prepared to downgrade the software to one that your system accepts as this would degrade my experiences of other programs that I run.
I have 2 lifetime accounts with Star Trek Online and I have played since it was in BETA. I want to enjoy the game but if you cant fix this I dont see any other choice other than close the account.
I have spoke to tech support a couple of times about this and thankfully they have been open and up front with me and gave me this answer:
You've been blunt with me (us), so I'll do the same in return. I completely agree with everything you said and have said as much myself when bringing up this very issue with the Cryptic development team. AMD cards represent a little less than 1/3 of our customer base, and to allow this sort of thing to go is, in my opinion, unacceptable and unprofessional. I was told that because this issue didn't pose a direct block preventing AMD users from playing, rather more of an annoyance to be skipped over, that this was an issue that was lower priority. Lower than what else they didn't tell me. I will continue to press to get this resolved in as timely a fashion as I can, but given that I personally don't write the code I can't offer any sort of timeframe for when that might be. The last time there was an issue with AMD cards it was inadvertently resolved by AMD attempting to fix other games.
I have not included the agent's name that I spoke with about this as I dont want any repercussions to be made against him/her.
This error does not just give a little clump of white text at the bottom right of the screen. On my system it forces me EVERY time I load the game to set up all my graphic settings from the start again. This affects ALL CRYPTIC games not just STO (they are all based on the same engine).
I want to be able to log in to the game and play on the best settings I can with my card and enjoy the game, I dont think that is too much to ask...
From the correspondence I have received from the tech support team, the guys that are doing the game coding are "hoping" that AMD fix it for them so they dont have to do anything that might actually help their customers. God forbid that they might actually have to do something other than fix costume bugs all day...
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Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
On mine, the box that pops up doesn't let me click on it, I have to just press enter or escape for it to go away.
The check box has never worked...
Get the Forums Enhancement Extension!
Buy a Nvidia based GPU. Experience what a real graphic card can do... lol.
Yes I know STO has bad coding for AMD/Ati cards, but so does a LOT of other games.
Buy Nvidia and never have a worry again!
That is the shittiest reply of all.
a. We are still allowed to buy any graphical card of any kind of brand from both, either nVidia or AMD. We don't live in a tyranny where we are forced to buy one single type of GPU.
b. DX9, DX10, DX11 & DX12 are a set of instructions from MicroSoft which both, nVidia & AMD, are providing by their drivers/updates. It's up to the devs of games to implement those drivers/instructions, from both, in a correct way. Shifting the responsibility and pointing to one of the providers of graphical cards, either AMD or nVidia, is a shameful attitude which starts to become the general rule in the developement world. It's never their fault, it's either the end user or AMD/nVidia's fault. In case of AMD, there shouldn't be an issue at all as everything of them is open source and free to access.
I changed my aging GTX 760 from Gigabyte by an RX 470 from XFX and have a performance gain in most games of 30 to 60 fps to that GTX 760, except in STO. So, to me and a lot of AMD users, the issue is not with the AMD cards, but with Cryptic and their developement.
No matter what GPU is being used, it's still for most a big investment which isn't been done on a yearly base. A bit more respect would be at place.
PS: if every player on Star Trek Online was a paying player and the yearly revenue of Cryptic was 3 Million USD, the a loss of 1/3 of their players because those use AMD will be equal as a loss of 1 Million USD for the company. Explain that once to your bosses and board of CEO's.
I agree with EVERYTHING you said there.
The problem isn't with the cards it is that PWI (which now owns Cryptic) dont want to spend any money on a game that has a FREE2PLAY playerbase unless said playerbase is coughing up on extras like zen points etc.
They are very good at realising ships, skins and other useless fluff items that do nothing different from the millions of other items in the store but when it comes to making the playerbase happy they dont give a TRIBBLE cause there is no $$$ in it.
When the game went live I willing paid £400 for 2 lifetime accounts (one for me and one for a friend) so that we didn't have to worry about monthly fees. Within 6 months of it being released the game gave us a free to play option cause people were saying the game was TRIBBLE and they were losing customers by the bucket load.
I enjoy the game but I dont want to have to log in each time and reset the graphics so that i get what I have paid for.
PS: the comments about nVidia being a better graphics card are false, look at any benchmark for the X4** range from AMD and compare them to the nVidia stats of similar price and you will see that AMD beats the living daylights out your nVidia overpriced bloated TRIBBLE.
That is strange then when it comes to AMD. As said, everything that they releasing in therm of resources is open source and free at hand. And if they, Cryptic/PWI, have in issue with implementing correctly the drivers, do like any normal employee with an issue that he/she can't resolve even with the tools at hand: "Pick up the phone and call for help".
If there was no F2P business model associated with STO like it was in the old days this bug wouldn't be there cause the 1/3 of the player base would be kicking up fuss as they are not getting a product that they would be paying for so the dev's would see it as a higher priority than Female Catian Starfleet Uniforms not working with the tail, or the rank pips getting hidden when you have a female character with big cha chas...
The dev's do not give a rats backside about the players and the tech support guy said as much in the support ticket I posted at the top.
And, although it is heresay evidence, previous experiencefrom the posts above seems to show that it is likely that AMD can/will fix the issue by fixing whatever line of code they put in the new AMD drivers release that is causing the problem.
Even without the heresay evidence, it doesn't take a rocket scientist, or in this case a software developer to see the quite obvious fact that there is nothing wrong with the game, the problem is cause solely because the AMD drivers are incorrectly reporting driver information
While you nVidia card owners could barely play the original WatchDogs when it came out on low, I was enjoying the game on max settings with no problems at all! It happens on both sides so keep your nVidia fan ignorance to yourself, please and thank you!
There should never be a two tier system for graphics support!
https://community.amd.com/thread/202433
I should note, that even though people always like to say NVidea is better, that's simply not the case. "Recently" they put out a driver version that caused all sorts of problems for people using windows. It's always been a problem and always will be.
When you choose to constantly upgrade to the bleeding edge then you had best be prepared for the outcome that sometimes comes with it.
Also, I've no idea what SnowWolf#0563 could've possibly been thinking with a post like the one made hyper-endorsing nVidia.
Here's a few things about both manufacturers that haven't been mentioned by any of the posters yet...
1 - Things about nVidia most people don't realize...
A) nVidia natively supports a graphics language called CUDA, but CUDA is essentially a more user friendly implementation of Visual C.
C) While PhysX is essentially an nVidia property, it IS SUPPORTED by all modern systems for the most part with the only difference being that...
D) When CUDA / PhysX is used in Development Coding, the PhysX code CAN BE offloaded DIRECTLY TO THE nVidia GPU instead of the CPU (Processor being either Intel or AMD).
E) nVidia's price points are rather high compared to AMD solely because their GPU's are designed to work with proprietary coding languages designed and licensed specifically by nVidia.
F) nVidia's software drivers to support their hardware are often twice the size of AMD drivers because much of what the nVidia hardware is designed to do is to run their own proprietary brand of Development Software and Code such as CUDA / PhysX
G) nVidia's graphics cards often do not support wide standard memory paths with the wide standards being 256-bit, 384-bit and 512 bit. i.e. 192-bit memory path featured on the GTX 1060 Chipset is NOT a standard memory path, and to get a standard path one would have to have the 1070GTX that I use as my base card with 8GB of RAM, but I waited quite some time for an adequate model to be released by nVidia. Many of nVidia's more general cards use a 128-bit path; however finding 256-bit and 384-bit memory paths is much more common with AMD cards.
2 - Things about AMD most people don't realize...
A) AMD supports PhysX that is required by some games, so the PhysX API has to be downloaded and installed from nVidia's website in the link featured here...
nvidia.com/object/physx-9.16.0318-driver.html
...the only difference being that PhysX processes will be handled solely by the CPU, and NOT the GPU.
C) AMD is RAW HARDWARE PROCESSING POWER (had to put EMPHASIS on that).
D) A great example of AMD's RAW HARDWARE PROCESSING POWER is that it leaves that CPU itself with very little work to do ONLY offloading processes like PhysX to the CPU, through the API for games that are using PhysX, SUPPORTS FAR MORE FLEXIBLE FACIAL ANIMATIONS, and SUPPORTS "HAIR ANIMATION" like TressFX that looks incredible in the new Tomb Raiders. I've an 8GB AMD Card as well that I'll run Tomb Raider on when I'm so inclined, and designed my build to support both types of hardware.
So, for oversimplified game design, sure nVidia's great, and a lot of Dev's use CUDA instead of just going straight for Visual C like they should because the attention to coding detail required by Visual C, while more time consuming and arduous, actually serves as a sort of incidental safeguard since bad Visual C code is almost immediately noticeable when testing any game... and....
...what a lot of people are seeing is actually bad Visual C code as emulated by CUDA / PhysX that may very well be a sort of 1st Cousin to Visual C, but nonetheless, is NOT Visual C... the catch is... no computer on the planet knows the difference between either and just processes the data it's told to. CUDA / PhysX is "convenient" but it's not great.
For fantastic animation and detail AMD's always been the way to go with dozens of games being shining examples of what can be accomplished with Visual C such as Deus Ex Human Revolution and the newer Tomb Raider games just to give a couple strong examples of detailed animation done right on AMD that is NOT possible on nVidia platforms.
Good developers meet these coding standard in the middle to avoid many of the issues / bugs people are bringing up because when it comes to coding, the two languages CUDA / PhysX & Visual C ARE "Close Cousins," so in all likelihood, Arc/Cryptic/PWE/Blacklight Retribution management, need to take a hard look at the quality of work being done in their name by their current developers.
Hopefully threads like these will lead to better opportunities for the developers that clearly need either additional resources and/or training on the platforms they develop for, and a better gaming experience for all of us gamers in the gaming community as well.
Here's to hoping... *Fingers Crossed*
- Lifetime Gamer
How much Zen to buy AMD access to the game? Maybe it's like a gold cap or something?
-Gil
One things though : The Breen vessel I scored via the Phoenix prize pack does not render properly. Just it's window lights and the exhaust from the Borg Impulse engine, I'm betting this is server side (No issues in the rest of the game)
AMD is raw, no frills processing, so in a xFire configuration, it's just pure power, and more often than not, will perform without error; especially if the system with the AMD graphics hardware is running on an Intel CPU system. Single AMD cards honestly don't fair with the same level of stability of single nVidia cards that run well on either AMD CPU or Intel CPU platforms.
NOTE for picardocapt and any others interested...
On the issue of the Window Lights... AMD is more animation intensive at the texture level than nVidia, and because of that, handles lighting calculations very differently, so the experience mentioned is frequent because things like windows are often just textures as opposed to mini-environments. A good example of this would be playing one of the Hitman games where you can see into a building from a long distance away to take the shot into an actual environment. When something like a window is JUST a painted texture WITHOUT an environment behind it, AMD graphics hardware often skews the lighting a bit because they're intended for more detailed environment maps instead of just plain 2D window textures.
- Lifetime Gamer