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Brightness issue - Possibly anisotropic in nature?
Gamer_One82
Member Posts: 10
Hey, people! ^_^
I'm an 'STO-er', too! 
But, unfortunately, I'm quite a mess at settings... Especially with my brand-new Asus notebook's GeForce nVidia and i7.
Speaking of which, wanna see what I have, please? ^_^ You'd be of *great* help to me *and* to my 8 years-old niece - for whom I created this STO account, in the first place! -, namely 1 year ago. 
https://imageshack.com/a/mx3b/1
https://imageshack.com/a/Qx3b/1
https://imageshack.com/a/wA3b/1
P.S. Please, help me, so that I won't get the same ultra-bright effects and all-white screens! Please...
N.B. In-game handler: @thetraveler82
Thank you, in advance!
Comments
screenshot of the issue?
It isn't your hardware, or shouldn't be.....also did you try cleaning your GFX drivers to latest?
ps: Did you also turn off bloom and other filters?
Hello, "BearKnight"!
Screenshots? You have them in my above ImageShack album links...
My GFX drivers? Also, my bloom option? Please, check-out those screenshot-filled albums and then give me a few pointers, step by step.
Much oblige!
You likely want to turn the brightness down. Also, I wouldn't turn bloom over 100%, as that's something that you tweak up or down to suit your taste, not a "more is better" type of thing.
While we're tweaking settings, I'd turn off SSAO and depth of field, as those carry a large performance hit without making the game look any better. (Different, perhaps, but not better.) I'd also turn shadows off entirely, as doing shadows properly carries such a huge performance hit that it would make the game unplayable, so games typically instead do some ugly, fake shadows that still carry a huge performance hit.
If you have capable hardware, that should free up enough performance to max the detail and draw distances while still having the game run smoothly. Speaking of which, what hardware do you have, anyway? Intel and Nvidia are brand names, not specific parts, so saying you have an Intel CPU and an Nvidia video card is about as specific as saying that your car is made by General Motors.
Anisotropic filtering is handled entirely by video drivers, and doesn't make things uniformly brighter or darker. Rather, it blurs textures some when viewed from sharp angles. It's also handled entirely by the video drivers, so programmers can't botch it apart from neglecting to give an option to turn it on, and it doesn't carry a very big performance hit, so you can easily set it to 16x if you want.
Hello, "Quizzical"!
First of all, I'd like to sincerely thank you for your promptness, but... I do run the game smoothly with most of my settings maxed-out!
It's just that, sometimes, my screen turns all-white, and I can only see my Neg'var starship - among other vague silhouettes -, OR it alternates between white and red while on Quo'nos... with big, white, squared boxes above NPCs, where some graphic symbols should be visible! Again, this only happens *on occasion*. Most of the time, it runs smoothly and quite eye-catching. 
As for my laptop's specs... why don't you wanna visit my albums which I linked above? They have *all* that you need, you know... 
Thanks!
First of all, no you don't run the game smoothly with all settings maxed. No one does, not even people with top end hardware. The renderscale option makes it so that the effective resolution can be turned arbitrarily high, which requires arbitrarily much computational power. You just haven't figured out how to max all possible settings. Or how to max very many of them, for that matter: in the settings that you linked, you've got a ton of draw distances turned way down.
Upon further review, you've probably got a Core i7-4500U and a GeForce GT 740M. I say "probably" because the screenshots contain contradictory information: a Core i7-4500U is Haswell, not Merom; the latter is long off the market. That's low end hardware, so it's not even going to run the game smoothly at particularly high settings, let alone max everything. And it's a very weird hardware configuration: I have no idea why someone would pair a discrete video card with a ULV processor. The only reason to even consider the latter is if you very highly value a very small, thin form factor, which the discrete video card makes impossible.
I realize that it's hard to find laptops with sensible specs. But if gaming is the intended use, it should be fairly trivial to get something massively faster for $800, or even merely quite a bit faster for $700. And even that is assuming that a gaming laptop makes sense for your niece, which it likely doesn't. If the laptop is brand new and you paid more than that for it, you'd do well to return it in favor of something more sensible. Considering that you implicitly paid $393 for the CPU alone, I'm betting that the laptop cost a lot more than that.
As for the graphical issues you describe, it sounds like it could be a video driver problem. Have you already downloaded and installed the latest video drivers from Nvidia? If not, then that might be the problem right there. As for white boxes in place of graphics, does the white box stay indefinitely, or is it quickly replaced by the proper graphic? If the latter, it's just a placeholder while you wait for the game to load stuff off of a slow hard drive. If the white boxes stay indefinitely, it probably means that you've got a corrupt installation of the game. That can occasionally happen by random chance, but it can also be caused by defective hardware, and I'd seriously worry about the latter if the hardware is brand new and you don't yet have reason to believe that everything works properly.
You're right about the i7-4500U and the GT 740M, which really do the job for me, still.
Well, in Romanian Lei,... it kinda revolves around that sum, you know.
Actually, it's a bit more expensive, like in... 900+ USD.
Well, it's not intended solely for gaming... I bought it for my job as a biomedical editor in dentistry, especially.
It says I have the latest drivers, so... ^_^ But, it also does say that I have a few other drivers missing... :-?
http://imageshack.com/a/img199/6435/5pje.jpg
It''s the latter, fortunately.
I wouldn't. I've come to realize that it was all the bloom intensity slider's fault. :P So, I "defaulted" everything on my nVidia Panel and lowered that intensity to 30%, as I previously mentioned. But you can check again my album with STO-related settings, to see for yourself that *now* everything's OK, finally.
Again, thank you!!! ^_^
If you haven't gone to the Nvidia web site yourself to download and install drivers from there, then it's very unlikely that you have the latest drivers. It's probable that you don't even have recent drivers. Device Manager hasn't the slightest clue what video drivers you ought to have, so it doesn't even try.
I can certainly believe that you run the game fairly smoothly at the settings you're using. But that's best described as moderate settings, not high or anywhere near max. Upon further review, you only said that you maxed most of the settings; I had misread that to say that you were running at max settings, which you certainly aren't, as you are aware. It's nice if the laptop does what you need it to do, but you probably could have gotten at least as good of performance for much cheaper--and may still want to do that if you can return the laptop to exchange it for something else.