Hi JT, just wanted to document a solution I found for some annoying graphics issues I've been having with STO, and a solution I found for getting the game settled down a bit. Now it plays fine, and looks fine.
First, the system specs:
Radeon Software Version - 16.11.5
Radeon Software Edition - Crimson
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 380 Series
Memory Size - 4096 MB
Memory Type - GDDR5
Core Clock - 990 MHz
Windows Version - Windows 10 (64 bit)
System Memory - 16 GB
CPU Type - AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8G
TRadeon Software Version - 16.11.5
Radeon Software Edition - Crimson
Graphics Chipset - AMD Radeon (TM) R9 380 Series
Memory Size - 4096 MB
Memory Type - GDDR5
Core Clock - 990 MHz
Windows Version - Windows 10 (64 bit)
System Memory - 16 GB
CPU Type - AMD A10-7850K Radeon R7, 12 Compute Cores 4C+8G
The main problem has been, for about the last month, since some change got made on the STO side, that a popup comes up when launching the game, saying the video drivers are out of date, and gives you a choice of starting with default or lowered settings, and it gives the option to save the choice for 30 days. Once in the game, there is text on the screen that claims that the video drivers on the system are out of date, which as you can see, is not true. It has been happening for the last four AMD Crimson driver update versions in a row. Force verifying files on startup, and even uninstalling and reinstalling the game does nothing to fix it. No other games have problems on this machine.
I was able to get past this by picking either of the options, then setting the graphics settings to whatever I wanted, and the game worked fine. It was just an annoying thing where I had to set settings every session or two, to get in and get it working, until Thursday.
After whatever update that was, the skin graphics of ships, people, and terrain would not appear. It was sort of like being an invisible man in an invisible ship or starbase, all you could see on my screen was my sinister goatee, hair, and uniform. For the ship, all you could see was the lights and some other highlights, sort of like when a ship is cloaked, but a different visual effect. You could see that the ship was there but could only see certain graphical elements of the ship. Menus were unaffected, but for anything other than administrative tasks, the game was unplayable like this.
Nothing, repeat nothing and no combination of settings worked to fix this issue until I did the following:
Go into Options, then the Graphics tab. Click on Use Sliders if they are not already highlighted, and slide the left slider, "Render Quality," all the way to the left. This made the ship reappear on my screen. Then begin changing one thing at a time and applying each change with the apply button until the ship disappears again. Some settings are immediate, and others require the Apply button to be pressed to take effect. I was at the screen where you see your ship and crew right before logging into the game. The two settings that caused this graphical glitch on my rig were, "lighting quality" set to High, and "Screen Space Ambient Occlusion" set to ON. This does not appear to change back and forth to and from the problem, if you are in the game. Switching them back and forth made the ship and people graphics disappear and re-appear on the logon screen, but once I'm in the game, there's no change when they are turned on again [they may even work fine], but this will make the glitch reappear on next logon. You can't see the glitch come and go in-game, only at the logon screen. Just turning them to Low and OFF and leaving them there fixes the problem completely, except for that the popup once every 30 days and text at the logon screen still appear. I have had a ticket open with Cryptic and will revisit it to forward them this information.