How to make online gaming graphics better

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Hi there!

I play Star Trek Online and there are some places in the game that will run much smoother than others. There are some space combat zones where it's laggy and choppy and generally unplayable. I'll then play in another area and it's smooth as can be. I still have to have my graphics settings almost all the way down but it's still pretty playable and smooth.

I was hoping someone could please help me figure out if there are settings for an early 2008 iMac that'll better facilitate online gaming or if you're familiar with online gaming at all and you know something about tricks and workarounds or issues involving memory leaks from games and whatnot, I'd really love to hear from you!

Thanks!

Likely, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that you're online specifically.

In all honesty, if you've put all of the settings down and it's STILL acting up, it could be one of a few things:

1. Your computer isnt powerful enough to handle it entirely. It sounds like it's definitely a bit old, so it might be too weak as a result, particularly if it was not built as a gaming rig to begin with.

2. There are incompatibilities between the game and the drivers or whatever that are connected to your video card and such.

3. It's the game itself, being glitchy or not optimized. Usually, this is combined with #1 up there to produce dramatic slowdown.

Typically, actual network lag does not manifest itself as things like framerate issues and such; the effects are usually weird things like rubberbanding, vanishing entities, or your character refusing to move for a few seconds despite that everything else around you is still animated. Stuff like that. And when there ARE network problems, your graphics settings wont matter.

Beyond that, it's best to just contact their support guys to get some assistance with it.

Do you experience the lags in crowded areas? Either the connection or the graphic card cannot serve so many characters at once.

The game should have some kind of "hide players/hide details/hide distance/hide effects" mode. Look for it in game settings. It can either hide specific characters (you may for example see only characters targeted or characters within a specified range around you), hide their graphic details using a dummy graphic - the same for each character - or at least hide all the shine and blow up animations.

Most games have such features somewhere in game settings. Not sure about this one though.

Edit: I found a topic about this on the game forum: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showt ... hp?t=73564
They share some tricks.

This is though, I can play a fairly high end game on the machine without any problems at maximum graphics settings.

When I'm in an area populated by other players, it can get a bit laggy but not entirely unplayable. But last night I was in a space combat zone just with stars, clouds and ships and the FPS went WAY down.

Definitely some sort of screwy technical issue, then.

Really, the main thing to do is to contact their support team, give them a description of the problem, and wait for a response. Believe me, it's MUCH less irritating then trying to deal with it just on your own. Particularly in an online game; losing progress or something on a single-player game because of an issue like that is bad enough, but at least with those you can reload saves and such.... no such luck with online games. Better to just deal with it ASAP so it doesnt get worse.


Beyond that.... the only other thing I personally would do is reinstall the game.

How often is it doing this though? Every time?

First off, I won't lie, I've never played Star Trek online. I haven't had much interest in the whole franchise as of yet (i really need to give it a try). This being said means what I say from this point on could be complete garbage. However, I have a lot of experience with MMO's and could give some insight to what the cause is.

Now let me start the real body of the diagnosis with the suggestion that Particles are the cause of lag. The fact of the matter is that no matter what, A high number of particles is going to to drop FPS significantly no matter the specs of your computer (seriously, not showing off but my PC is a beast boasting 32GB of RAM, an i7 Ivybridge processor and a Geforce GTX 770. This thing is a beast but while playing minecraft of all games, I had upwards of over 2000 particles and the games FPS dropped from a 300 down to a 3...). Assuming that the game generates the graphics the way I believe they do, The Stars are probably just part of a sky box meaning it's mostly texture and nothing to worry about, The ships will probably have a little bit of particle effects if not a lot considering they probably display engine trails, shield hits and weapons fired. The last culprit is the clouds that are generated in 2 possible ways (of which i can think of anyway) that is general polygon, texture and opacity OR the particle way. The latter of the two gives the best looking results.

You then need to take into account that it is an online game, if you internet isn't great, there will be lag. If it's a game where the environment plays a heavy role on how the combat will change then i wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the area is dealt with in the servers meaning if your computer isn't getting all the data fast enough, you're gonna get lag son.

Lastly, and I'm going to be saying this as a person who owns an iMac, iMacs are just not designed to play graphic intense games. I mean sure you can get a game like Borderlands working on it and give good results but lets be fair here, it doesn't have a dedicated graphics card by default. It uses the processor, RAM and the Motherboard as a substitute to a graphics card. It's not designed for gaming, It's designed for production and casual games but not anything hardcore like MMO's.

Hope this helps though I feel as though i may have trod on peoples feelings by mistake >,.,> seriously, if any of this sounds mean, I guarantee it was not intentional and i don't mean it >,.,>

Minecraft isnt a very good example: As much as I like the game (and I absolutely love it) it honestly just wasnt made very well. It was made in Java of all things, and is about as optimized as a dead frog in sludge. It doesnt even NEED a reason to run badly. It'll simply do so. An all-powerful PC of amazing doom (which is pretty much what I have) wont stop it from doing this. If you want to see what happens when the game IS optimized, go download the Optifine mod, install it, max it out, and watch what it does. The fact that that mod can make the game's graphics go RIDICULOUSLY farther than the normal game (you get alot more options and can set all options MUCH higher), while at the same time *improving* performance (and it's a HUGE improvement, and the better your machine is, the further this will go), is proof that the normal game is just.... yeah. It's very badly optimized and sheer power isnt enough to get it running smoothly.

Having played about 10 bazillion MMOs, among way too many other PC games to count (that being my main gaming device) the number one offender to me, by far, as graphics go, is shadows. Typically when trying to set up options on my older machines or helping friends, this is the number 1 first priority that I look at, usually dropping it to low or just entirely off. The framerate change is usually MASSIVE.

Other lighting effects are priority #2. Particles, honestly, I usually ignore. I've always found that their effect is kinda small. Unless things are getting REALLY screwy, then definitely try turning them down.

Of course, you can also reduce the resolution overall, but.... yeah, nobody likes to do that if it is at all possible to avoid.


Also, yes, you're right, iMacs just arent made for that sort of thing also, so that probably isnt helping one bit.

And big rule #1 of graphics-intensive PC gaming: You *need* a dedicated video card if you want to really get the graphics going. Absolutely NEED one. Otherwise, it's very low settings for you in most cases. This doesnt just apply to iMacs, but to.... everything. I personally consider "on-board" default graphics processors to be completely useless. Typically if someone comes to me with a problem, looking to improve performance, and I find out they're still using an "integrated" type, my response is basically "Nope. Get a video card, THEN I'll help".


EDIT: Also, from what I've heard, Star Trek Online just doesnt run all that smoothly to begin with. Some games are like that. Though it's nowhere near as problematic as Minecraft is, I'm betting.

Turn down the graphical detail settings, and while you're at it, see if you can reduce the sound quality as well. Last night, I was encountering framerate issues on Titanfall, which is a game that normally runs at a decent 60fps on my system, albeit on low detail settings, but with the resolution and FOV maxed out, so I did some research and found that a significant FPS boost could be gained by turning down some of the sound detail settings. Well lo and behold, it significantly reduced the choppiness I was encountering.

The way Titanfall handles FPS drops is rather strange though, because instead of slowing down, it just drops frames and makes things hard to control, almost like playing on a high-latency connection, which I thought was the issue at first. It turns out my ping was just fine, but I was dropping frames in areas with a lot of intense action. I didn't encounter this so much before, probably because I just started out playing and I was being matched with lower-skill players.

Just a thought but if your computer is a 2008 model that makes it like 7 years old, perhaps it could be time to start looking to upgrade to a newer computer or at least upgrade the hardware/software of the one you have. I mean computers don't last forever....

My computer is comprised of parts dating from 2006 all the way to present day, with the median being somewhere around 2009. I'm running an overclocked Core 2 Duo E8500, a 1GB Radeon HD 5770, and 8GB of DDR2 on an Asus P5B. I can do all of my day-to-day stuff just fine, and as I mentioned earlier, I can even play Titanfall reasonably well, which is astonishing as that's a fairly recent game. Now, I'd still like to upgrade my computer to a newer platform sometime in the near future, but as it is, I'm amazed how well it still runs.

This is the bane of MMO's. in crowded areas, the servers need to send and request information to a lot (sometimes 100's) of players, they just can't handle that.

it's not the gfx settings, most games run those client-side (as in, your own computer); it is purely the stress of having 100's of things happening all at once (in battles, 1000's). try doing the same battles in an offline game, same issue.

i get this with AC4 (black flag). it runs smoothly all-over, slows down once i 'trigger' a sea-battle and grinds to 5-ish FPS once i'm in a boarding action on anything bigger than a frigate; just too much actors running around for my poor CPU.
multiply that by 20 for an MMO combat server; you'll see the problem

Yeah, get a better iMac or (even better), a gaming PC. iMacs aren't meant for gaming on.