So, I thought it would be a good suggestion that the game be able to provide lower graphics settings, without sacrificing graphical asthetics.

Right now, 1/2 Resolution speeds up the game, but it's still incredibly laggy in populated areas. I would LOVE it if I could play at 1/1 resolution.

Here are some Ideas that would allow my 5-year old computer to play STO at full Resolution, but would qualify as a knock-off of graphics (lower setting):

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- Less/no portrait, background animations (like when a hail comes in... no animation, just a picture)
- Decreased particle-effect complexity (or just less particles, a lot lot less, or none at all)
- less wire-frame detail (basically, the ship/character/all model isn't as rounded, or smooth as it is 'perfectly')
- no background: I know that at starbases, you can look outside windows, or in space, you can see solar-polarity (a camera effect), or standing officers will do things when idle (or even idle ships). basically non of that.
- less GUI animations. This means no button animations, like a 'shining' effect, or swipting-in windows. Fancy stuff like that.
- no 'warp-trail'.
- No lighting effects, or make the lighting engine take less CPU when the option is set.
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Now, I know my computer is 5 years old, and of course it is going to be slow. I just wish I could play it at full resolution. That way, I could enjoy it a bit more. Now, I really don't care how bad the graphics get, as long as it is a setting in the graphics options menu, and I can play at full resolution.

If these options could be added in the settings, I would definitely be able to play at full resolution, without a hitch.

Does your system lag significantly when a hail comes in? This should have no more cost to the graphics system than rendering a single character would.

This is exactly what the Visual FX Quality setting in the graphics options affects. Also, the Soft Particles setting will save a bit of fill time if disabled. "Soft particles" just softens the edge where a particle intersects other geometry.

This is what the World/Terrain/Character detail distance sliders do. (Not the texture sliders.) Some other features are based of the scales of these values too.

All the sun effects (the lens flare and the halo) are really just sprites. The character animation fidelity is also affected by the character detail distance slider.

Do these cause significant slowdowns when they happen? If so, I might have to talk to the UI guys, but in theory the complexity of handling all those animations together is virtually insignificant compared to what it takes to render even one character.

I believe warp trails are classified as one of the FX that goes away when you drop the Visual FX quality. Visual FX quality mainly just affects what plays vs. what doesn't, rather than changing the appearance of the FX.

This is what the Dynamic Lighting, Lighting Quality, Shadows, Max lights per object, and Max shadowed lights settings affect.

It seems that your main issue is fill rate, if halving the resolution speeds you up significantly. The settings under the advanced options that will affect that (mainly) are these...

* Everything in the Performance tab, especially Antialiasing. (Sometimes that one's turned on by default when it shouldn't be.)
* All of the texture quality options under the Detail tab.
* From the Effects tab: Postprocessing, Visual FX Quality, Soft Particles, Bloom quality, Screen-space ambient occlusion, Depth of field, and Reflection quality.
* Lens flare quality in the effects tab has the result of changing the way the lens flare occlusion works. So if you turn it off you'll probably just get lens flare poking through things it shouldn't.




PS. Hi again. I remember you.

OP: you might need should be able to set your screen resolution to lower value without turning on half resolution as you can retain the quality, just sacrifice the screen space (just adjust the UI scale as needed).

The following affect FPS the most:

• Dynamic Lighting
• Lighting Quality
• Shadows
• Max Lights Per Object
• Max Shadowed Lights
• Post Processing
• Visual Fx Quality
• Soft Particles
• Bloom Quality/Intensity
• Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
• and most if not all in the Detail Tab (view distance set to a lower value will increase your FPS

an whilst your here Cliff, whats the status on DX11, at least on the performance side for those that can use it and would like you to check up on the UI team to see if they can do an overall optimization pass on it for those will lower end systems; as its only until I got a i7 hex core that things have smoothed out, I had some issues with it when I had an i5 quad core.

I also have an "ancient" desktop pc of about 5 years with a Raedon 3XXX. I've spent a lot of time tweaking both the game visual and graphics card settings and seem to have ironed out the majority of any performance-hindering issues/challenges that this PC would face.

What has sort of panned out, however, is that I am finding myself having to alter the "visual profile" every time I beam back and forth between space and ground/away team.
I don't have to, but like everyone else, I want the best picture possible at any given point. So I put up with it.

For my situation, rather than an additional flat, across-the-board "dilluting" of the graphics, I would benefit greatly from some sort of graphics "toggle switch," where I could flip back and forth between two different visual setting profiles.

Oh, and for the OP, you know you can right-click on the impulse engines and deactivate your warp trail, at least on set engines?