Hey All,

I was excited to get back into STO with season 4, I had stop playing about 1.5 months ago once unlocking my MVAM ship.

Upon hearing about the new combat mode and 4x texture resolution options for no extra performance, I only got more excited.


However, I loaded into ESD in the teleporter room, with no one around but NPCs, only to see my usual 100-110fps suddenly had dropped to around 55 fps.

I thought maybe my settings had reset, but I went back into options, made sure FPS limit was set to 120, Vsync was off, etc, but everything was set to the same.

The last time I had saw this massive of a performance decrease was right before launch of the game. At that time, it was discovered to be something weird with the GUI rendering, as when you ALT+F12, you'd get massive FPS boosts, and the UI shouldn't take any real rendering power. This went away with the first patch at launch(which was technically the launch patch), so I never thought anything of it.

Remembering back to that, I thought I'd go ahead and give it a shot. Alt+F12, and all of a sudden I'm going from 55fps to 115 fps.

While I doubt I'd get a dev response, does anyone know if anything changed with the UI that would make it take this much processing power? Obviously, the FPS even drops down lower if I open more windows like the inventory.

I've included my DXdiag, but general info is: 4gb ram, i5 750 CPU, Geforce GTX 275 GPU, Creative xfi sound card.


Any/all insight is greatly appreciated.


Edit: looking back, it looks like it reoccurred back in march of last year, then went away again.

Double edit: This may belong in graphical issues. If so, let me know and I'll wipe the thread if it can't be moved.

Thanks for this thread! I now know why my 470 lags in this game. It's the damn UI. Turning it off makes my frames skyrocket.

I also filed a ticket in game for this particular problem.

I also have a ticket in.

Snog: Could you chime in with what your video card is?

Also, could anyone with an ATI card see if they can confirm this issue as well?

I always thought "that's the way it is"

At home I have an 8GB/Dual Core/ATI Radeon rig that I run full out at 1920x1080 and the UI is never a problem.

But on my considerably slower laptop (a 2007-vintage MacBook running BootCamp that has no business running STO) the game is very playable - as long as I hide the UI. When the UI is up, fuhgeddaboutit.

I'm using an Nvidia Geforce 470GTX. I'm also on Windows 7 64-bit too.

Thanks for the heads up. KineticImpulser, if you're still about, could you tell me what OS you're running?
If also Win764bit, could anyone in the forums /not/ running that OS do this same test to eliminate it from being a 64 bit/os issue?

You're not the first to take notice of this.

Over the past year or so, I've seen a few threads that describe this very thing.

The general theory is the opacity related to to areas such as the chat and mission windows, but to my knowlege there has been no statement about it so far.

Hi guys, I hate to bump a really old thread but I can't find a solution for this issue.

I get a stable 20fps with the ui on. Turn it off and I hit my limited 60fps right away and it stays there nicely. 2/3 of my power going to the ui? something is wrong...

like others I am running Win7 64-bit with an nVidia GTX 460 running in dx11 mode.

Hoping someone has seen this issue and has a fix. It is even worse in dx9 where my system dumps down to 13fps with the ui on.

Can you guys post some videos showing FPS (FRAPS will drop your FPS too while recording, but should still show some number differences) drops that you are getting?