Seeing issues as well when I open the skills tab for my main character.
Seems everything in the background while that paticular menu is open just slows down.
I have not clocked the fps for the skills page issue, but I can visually tell from the background behind the skills tab , that things get slow and start to get choppy.

For some reason I am also seeing a decent amount of lag/grabbing when menus open and I don't recall having that before. Seems like this last part was just started recently and the first thing I mentioned in the opening paragraph has been happening the whole time since OB.

Not to mention ships often stop and go in space like they have some sort of jet lag or something.
I do not seem to have lag for my ship or much on the ground, but ships other than my own have this move and pause routine.

I know this thread is a bit old, but the standard UI reduces my FPS by half, and opening windows like inventory halves that!

I get the same drops in FPS but I find it most noticeable on the exchange window. If you have the ex window open and go to check what you have equipped on yourself or your ship then go back to the ex window and scroll its a massive FPS hit.

I just went to try this out.
Down on some planet I engaged a group of Borg.
Using Alt+F12 disabled my UI and let the framerate climb up a little, the gameplay was smoother, BUT:
Whenever a Borg was slain, it just disappeared as it stood.
No falling to the floor, no animation, nothing except a fade-out.
So I'm guessing that Alt+F12 also disables some stuff that requires GPU/CPU power just to be ready when it's needed.

I set up STO on an older machine of mine and the results were startling. I get 2-3 fps normally in sector space and tried disabling the hud with alt-f12 and immedaitely jumped to 35fps! You can get the same effect by escape to bring up the main menu. This seems to be some janky hud code. It would be kind of crucial for people with older computers to be able to turn off whatever processing effects they are running on the hud.

ZOMBIE!!!!!!

I know i'm digging up a dead thread but it's something that is happening to me, did this ever get solved? did anyone figure out a way to fix this or anything?

I was getting slow downs too. Till I discovered the bios setting 'cpu thermal throttling'. With this disabled everything is fine

try playing with a rubbish card like mine 45fps max in non crowded areas,drops to 22fps on esd,even with ui disabled i only get 53fps

I'd like to chime in.

I run the game at highest settings.
My resolution is 1920x1600 (desktop resolution).
I play on a 16:10 Samsung Brilliance 240B monitor. Full Screen mode.

As cliche as it may be, it is worthy of note that I am able to run many graphically-intensive games without a hitch (and that STO is far from being state of the art ala Crysis-whatever, no offense, it's a beautiful game nonetheless and I love it).

Usually the game operates at the 40-60fps, averaging in the 45-50s.
However, whenever the skill and inventory overlays are called in the FPS drops drastically.

Social / Fleet windows also have a slight effect, but nothing as severe as those two aforementioned.
They're truly frame-rate killer and upon opening them a steep decline occurs onto the 20-30 FPS, sometimes lower!

I've used "/showfps 1" and "/fpsgraph 1" to conduct repeated observations and the conclusion is always the same.
The skill and inventory overlays generate a massive sink that sucks the FPS down instantly from the moment of their rendering.


And before some wise-guys start blaming it on my machine (as I saw in past threads) as though it can't handle the graphic settings...

My hardware specs are as follows:

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K
HD: Intel SSD Solid State Disk X25-M 2.5" 120GB SATA2
MEM: x2 Samsung DDR3 4096MB 1333Mhz CL 9-9-9-27
GPU: Galaxy nVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 1536MB DDR5 PCIe
MOBO: Intel BLKDH67CLB3 Cold Lake
Box: CoolerMaster CM 690 I
CU: CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus
APU: Chieftec Turbo Modular 700W


So as you can see, the most common claims (insufficient cpu/gpu power, insufficient memory, harddrive running out of swap room/slow R-W motor/over-fragmented, not enough power to feed the gpu, over-heating machine) are rendered moot.


It'd be nice to customers/gamers if Cryptic officially acknowledged the existence of the issue and prioritize its treatment, as it is quite cumbersome.


Thank you very much.


[[
Post Scriptum:

Kindly disregard my sig/avatar, last time I was active on the forums been a very long time ago and I haven't bothered to fix it since.
]]

Sorry you guys haven't been getting much traction on this issue. It's here in the Graphical Issues forum because someone falsely assumed the bottleneck is the actual rendering of the UI.

It's not. It's mostly updates and internal scripts firing off constantly. They do things like determine which abilities you can currently use and grey out things like weapons when your enemy is out of range, out of view, or out of your firing arc. A lot of these checks happen every frame and really start adding up.

The inventory is particularly bad about it.

Internally, we've argued the merits of event-driven versus polling for UI updates and we're aware of the performance issues. The UI team takes this into consideration, and I'm sure they try to keep stuff at a reasonable CPU cost.

This isn't a graphical issue, though. So you're aiming this at the wrong devs. =P