I know the prime component is how good is your video card. I recently upgraded to a 1920x1080 monitor, and STO seems to run all right most of the time. But in some areas (ESD especially), the games grinds to a halt. Or randomly hiccups for no reason. This suggests to me that it might not be my video card creating the bottleneck in trying to render 1920x1080. What else could do that?

Do you have Win 7? If so, go to the start button and type in "games explorer". Open that. Off to the right, you'll see an option that says "Rate this computer". Clickie on that. Then clickie "Refresh Now".

That should tell you if you have something slowing you down. Spacedock can introduce a lot of lag though all on its own. I wouldn't worry too much about that map in particular.

ESD has some serious issues...and has for a LONG time. There are some pretty nasty memory leaks there that will ruin your day....

What is your:

Video card (brand type model number)

screen resolution

windows version

do you allow disck caching on your hard drive

is your video card driver up to date?

How long has it been since your last clean windows install?

Random but intensive hickups are not necessarily caused by your videocard, it could be anything. Slow access to the harddisk whereas the game stalls because it needs a certain part loaded into the memory before it can continue. (Textures being loaded from disk, if they're not in your memory) etcetera.

Another thing that really made my game hickup was somehow setting the bloom quality to Low quality instead of High, somehow the low quality engine really made the game go weird.

Anyways, it could be anything.

What I can suggest is;

- Update video drivers to latest version
- Dont run too much crap in the background of your computer.

Last but not least:

- Put all graphics settings on low and put them back to normal/high step by step, go over every setting and see if it begins to give 'hickups'

If you can mange to isolate the specific setting that causes it, you are done

what cpu do you have on your system and how much ram do you have on your system? have you maxed out the video memory allocation under troubleshooting to you cards vram size?

Yup forgot to mention that.

In my case the Video memory limit was limited to 128MB Graphics memory, while my actual dedicated memory is 256MB.

Also the 'Auto' feature doesnt seem to correctly detect it all the time. Feel free to change this to the specific amount of dedicated video memory you have.

In addition, you can even set this value higher, meaning it will use shared video memory (Aka. it will use your Normal system memory as well to store textures and geometry data when your dedicated memory runs full)

But this would normally only be necessary if you would go over your dedicated memory limits. And you would notice that soon enough (Textures just popping out of nowhere, changing from blurry to sharp when you turn the camera around)

Hort is right - beware the ESD, its been known to suck the life right out of a whole pack of Denebian Slime Devils in under 120.23354423 seconds!

I blame ESD.

I have no issues for most of the game. But ESD? oh boy.

At least we aren't flying our starships through ESD anymore ahhh good times.. Good Times!