Is my graphics card compatible with STO's DirectX requirements, or not?

wombat140 · June 2018

My laptop's graphics card is Mobile Intel® GM45 Express Chipset, and no, I don't think it can be replaced, although correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't played the game after the upgrade last year when the game stopped supporting DirectX 9. I'd actually thought that I'd be OK, since my grapchis card goes up to DX10; but after the upgrade I started getting messages saying that my graphics card was no longer supported or words to that effect, so I thought that was that.
Well, looking round the forum for otrher reasons reacently, I got the impression that I was right the first time, it shold run, and also that that error message sometimes comes up when it shouldn';t and there are fixes for it. So I started trying to get it running and give it a try, but I'm having one problem after another getting the thing running, and so far, I haven't even got as far as the bit where it starts complaning about the graphics card, so I haven't had a chance to test wherther I can get past that or not.

Before I waste any more time on it, pelase can those here who know more about what these graphics specifications actually mean please give me an opinion? Do you think the thing is actually capable of running STO anyway and it's worth trying to get it to run, or is it not going to work anyway, in which case I can cut my losses and use the disk space for something else?

Thanks very much.

jaguarskx · July 2018

Technically speaking, STO should be able to run with the Intel GM45 chipset which has the Intel GMA 4500M graphics core which supports DirectX 10. It is one of the first Intel chipsets with an integrated graphics core that supports DX10. There could be an issue where not all features of DX10 is supported.

Even if STO was able to run, the performance would not be good anyway. I have an old Lenovo Ideapad Y470 laptop from 2011 which has the "more modern" Intel HD 3000 and the last time I ran STO on it back in early 2017 (for testing purposes) performance was pretty lousy at less 25 FPS at 1366x768 resolution, low graphic settings and not in combat.

A modern laptop that has an Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPU (currently up to the 8th generation) will have a graphics core (Intel UHD 620) that is capable of playing STO... though not with max graphic settings. So if you get to the point where you need to replace your current aging laptop, then rest assured, you will be able to STO again with decent performance.

wombat140 · July 2018

Thanks Jaguarskx. That's pretty muich what I was expecting - STO always did struggle on this computer, by the time I last ran it, anyway.

starswordc · July 2018

wombat140 wrote: »

Thanks Jaguarskx. That's pretty muich what I was expecting - STO always did struggle on this computer, by the time I last ran it, anyway.

Yeah, I've never seen CPU graphics to work well enough to run STO very well -- I had a few cases with my 2012-vintage Samsung laptop where updating the Nvidia driver didn't work quite right, meaning it was running on the Intel HD 4000 chip. It chugged.

If you don't play on the move a lot, you might consider switching to a tower. You can build a solid gaming tower for relatively little (certainly one that will run STO). PC Gamer magazine has occasional parts guide article; this one comes to $1250. If you want, you can also safely downgrade the graphics card to a GeForce GTX 1050 and save a couple hundred dollars.

Is my graphics card compatible with STO's DirectX requirements, or not?

Comments