New Planet Tech is KILLER of Exploration (all terrain is tiling/repeating/not procedural/random)

[Just]

Totally with you on that point: if you can describe your position as an ideology, then you fell of the table on the wrong end

Yes, and the funny part is: I am NOT a person who thinks he "knows better" then others.
Quite the opposite, I usually use my "computing power" to prove how much of people's "facts" are simplifications, assumptions, generalizations etc.
Because with age I realized, that we are ALMOST like "Jon Snow", we just like to suppress this by absorbing some pre-processed, selectively chosen information/reasoning sets, that fit our current needs/expectations/fears etc.

OK, but this is soooo... OT

 

[Rat Catcher]

Yes, and the funny part is: I am NOT a person who thinks he "knows better" then others.
Quite the opposite, I usually use my "computing power" to prove how much of people's "facts" are simplifications, assumptions, generalizations etc.
Because with age I realized, that we are ALMOST like "Jon Snow", we just like to suppress this by absorbing some pre-processed, selectively chosen information/reasoning sets, that fit our current needs/expectations/fears etc.

OK, but this is soooo... OT

I'll disagree that your observation is OT...
All you have said is that you think things over, surely?

In another thread - a player states "I'm enjoying playing Odyssey" - to have a suggestion thrown back that "70% of steam reviewers suggest you are lying" (paraphrased) - hints that precise thought is at a premium here.

Keep up the good work!

 

[babelfisch]

Reshade. Which a lot of commanders use. It is exactly what the video describes, in a non hyperbolic manner. It is post processing, to make the game look better then it does. Does everyone in the screenshot thread use them? No, but you can see ReShade on some of them. Like when you spot the Depth of Field effect that does not exist in that shape or form in EDO.

Isn't DOF part of the camera suite?
Probably depends on the screenshot. I am pretty sure some people use reshade, but that wasn't the argument. The author of the video claims that all Odyssey terrain looks bad and every time it doesn't people are liars. I don't know, but to me that's a pretty weak position to criticise something. Which is a shame, because Odyssey actually deserves criticism, just not from dishonest people.

 

[hunvagy]

Isn't DOF part of the camera suite?
Probably depends on the screenshot. I am pretty sure some people use reshade, but that wasn't the argument. The author of the video claims that all Odyssey terrain looks bad and every time it doesn't people are liars. I don't know, but to me that's a pretty weak position to criticise something. Which is a shame, because Odyssey actually deserves criticism, just not from dishonest people.

And I wholeheartedly agree, the worst part is, that the screenshot generalization undermines the actual problems the video showcases. Like the disappearing terrain features later on. And the fact that some planet DO look like Playstation 1 escapees right now.

 

[Fishy]

Having spent a fair bit of time visiting random surface stations and installations, I'm now at the point where imho, it's actually ok. While I haven't seen huge sharp mountains or deep narrow canyons, I've seen my fair share of good looking valleys, plains and hillscapes, with the added perk of occasionally colourful atmospheres. It makes for some pretty cool views from some of those station's lounges. It gives me a serious Total Recall (the Arnie one) vibe when it happens to have a red atmosphere.

In addition to the obvious difference in features, my impression is that the biggest issue is the complete "reshuffling" of planets, meaning that we tend to revisit the good-looking places we had written down, only to find boring flats. I feel like the vistas are still around, just in different places that we'll find over time. And yes, they won't be the same either. And don't get too attached either. Any addition to the pool of tiles or adjustment to the generation will likely reshuffle everything at some point in the future...

In addition to the mountains/canyons differences, my main observation so far is that things tends to be very very grey. I used to see a lot of dusty beige/brown/maroon planets in Horizons, now things seem predominantly cement grey. It could just be the bias of the spots I've been to, mind, I haven't been looking particularly hard.

 

[Just]

In addition to the obvious difference in features, my impression is that the biggest issue is the complete "reshuffling" of planets, meaning that we tend to revisit the good-looking places we had written down, only to find boring flats.

Spot on.
Every post like
"I visited a planet I liked in Horizons and now it is looking like crap,
ergo
new planetary tech is crap"
Triggers a mental facepalm, but it's too many of them to bother with explaining what you have just mentioned.

 

[babelfisch]

And I wholeheartedly agree, the worst part is, that the screenshot generalization undermines the actual problems the video showcases. Like the disappearing terrain features later on. And the fact that some planet DO look like Playstation 1 escapees right now.

The disappearing terrain thing is another problem. Personally I don't have enough experience with the new planet tech in order to make a solid statement. But I do know that what he shows isn't universally. I don't doubt that it can happen and it absolutely deserves to be criticised when it happens. He makes it sound like it would happen all the time though and that Odyssey just can't create interesting terrain at all. Everything is fake. I think he should take the video offline, edit it and re upload. It's not like I can't forgive people when they screw up (looks at FDEV).

 

[hunvagy]

The disappearing terrain thing is another problem. Personally I don't have enough experience with the new planet tech in order to make a solid statement. But I do know that what he shows isn't universally. I don't doubt that it can happen and it absolutely deserves to be criticised when it happens. He makes it sound like it would happen all the time though and that Odyssey just can't create interesting terrain at all. Everything is fake. I think he should take the video offline, edit it and re upload. It's not like I can't forgive people when they screw up (looks at FDEV).

The worst part was the extra post in Discussion, when the video was wielded around like some smoking gun that we have been lied to. I mean everyone who was in the alpha kinda knew what we will be getting. But yes, it should probably be re-edited, as now we know it is not always the case, and we have no idea what the real problem is.

I still suspect it is something mostly with legacy planets, but.. I really am not paid to do FDevs work to find out.. or to test.

 

[varonica]

Reshade. Which a lot of commanders use. It is exactly what the video describes, in a non hyperbolic manner. It is post processing, to make the game look better then it does. Does everyone in the screenshot thread use them? No, but you can see ReShade on some of them. Like when you spot the Depth of Field effect that does not exist in that shape or form in EDO.

Don't use reshade...never used reshade, why are you assuming everybody who posts screenshots uses reshade? And yes, depth of field is available as part of the built in camera feature, so yes it does exist in EDO, maybe you should look at the built in camera a bit more.

 

[Morbad]

The texture and model LOD issues seem strongly correlated with available VRAM. There are exceptions, but I don't think I'd heard of a single account of a 3GiB card without them before Hotfix 3 (which killed performance on such parts in exchange for keeping more assets available in shared memory) and only a few people with over 8GiB VRAM are having issues.

I never saw any of it on the cards I've been testing with, which have 10-16GiB.

As for the planets, a lot of areas look pretty good...a lot of areas don't. It's hard to make direct comparisons because most worlds seem to have been regenerated from scratch and aren't even recognizable as the same planet.

Frame rates that have, by all accounts, shot up at the first update yesterday, by any chance?

I believe they've improved slightly, for me, with each hotfix and with yesterday's update.

I'm currently getting almost, but not quite, the same performance in Odyssey with my RX 6800 XT that my better 1080 Ti gets in Horizons, at the same settings in roughly equivalent scenes. The former card is a sold 50% faster than the later.

Even if every IQ increase was working as it should without any quality damaging bugs, I'd expect the graphics improvements, especially when the stated requirements for the game hadn't changed, to cost maybe 10% of my frame rate. Any more than that would almost mandate a significant change to system requirements and knock a lot of borderline systems out of the realm of playability...which is exactly what happened.

Any improvement is nice, but there is still quite a ways to go.

Sadly not, still runs like trash on my Ryzen 7 2700X and my RTX 2060 in 1080p.

At lower resolutions (anything below 4k in my case, becoming near omnipresent around 1080p) I still see inexplicable drops in frame rate and reported CPU and GPU utilization. There is some sort of bottleneck present that doesn't really cease being a bottleneck until the requirements of other settings or effects outpace it.

 

[hunvagy]

Don't use reshade...never used reshade, why are you assuming everybody who posts screenshots uses reshade? And yes, depth of field is available as part of the built in camera feature, so yes it does exist in EDO, maybe you should look at the built in camera a bit more.

I'm pretty sure I explicitly said in what you quoted that not everyone uses it, but oh well.

 

[Just]

At lower resolutions (anything below 4k in my case, becoming near omnipresent around 1080p) I still see inexplicable drops in frame rate and reported CPU and GPU utilization. There is some sort of bottleneck present that doesn't really cease being a bottleneck until the requirements of other settings or effects outpace it.

Yes, there is something off in sudden resolution-triggered performance drop.
I play on RTX 2070s 8GB
In native (2560x1080p) resolution exploring activity became playable even with ultra shadows and ultraforcapture terrain - frame drops below my vsync locked 60fps are not as significant as they were before last update and after game finishes doing whateveritisdoing while exiting planetary glide it can recover to 60fps (not always).

But
When I turn supersampling (or NVIDIA DSR) on, fps just plummets and reducing all other graphic setting doesn't seem to help much.

There is a lot of other games I play with superspampling/DSR (including Horizons I play at 2560x1080p 2xSS) - they have more "linear" correlation between resolution and performance.
In EDO its like... exponential.
Increasing resolution is causing performance drop way beyond expected and reasonable factor.

 

[Deleted member 182079]

The texture and model LOD issues seem strongly correlated with available VRAM. There are exceptions, but I don't think I'd heard of a single account of a 3GiB card without them before Hotfix 3 (which killed performance on such parts in exchange for keeping more assets available in shared memory) and only a few people with over 8GiB VRAM are having issues.

I never saw any of it on the cards I've been testing with, which have 10-16GiB.

As for the planets, a lot of areas look pretty good...a lot of areas don't. It's hard to make direct comparisons because most worlds seem to have been regenerated from scratch and aren't even recognizable as the same planet.



I believe they've improved slightly, for me, with each hotfix and with yesterday's update.

I'm currently getting almost, but not quite, the same performance in Odyssey with my RX 6800 XT that my better 1080 Ti gets in Horizons, at the same settings in roughly equivalent scenes. The former card is a sold 50% faster than the later.

Even if every IQ increase was working as it should without any quality damaging bugs, I'd expect the graphics improvements, especially when the stated requirements for the game hadn't changed, to cost maybe 10% of my frame rate. Any more than that would almost mandate a significant change to system requirements and knock a lot of borderline systems out of the realm of playability...which is exactly what happened.

Any improvement is nice, but there is still quite a ways to go.



At lower resolutions (anything below 4k in my case, becoming near omnipresent around 1080p) I still see inexplicable drops in frame rate and reported CPU and GPU utilization. There is some sort of bottleneck present that doesn't really cease being a bottleneck until the requirements of other settings or effects outpace it.

Question for you, do you delete the graphics settings files each time after an update lands? I haven't done so for yesterday's 2 patches/hotfixes, and when I started playing (and throughout the game really) the general stutter and jank was a lot worse than before (even in SC/transitions). Unless the game just required to 'settle in' - didn't play all that long last night.

 

[CMDR Sheehy]

I'm pretty sure I explicitly said in what you quoted that not everyone uses it, but oh well.

I don't think you know that that means: "in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt."

Stating the opposite is not explicitly saying that not everyone uses it. The whole premise of your post was that Reshade usage presented an inaccurate presentation of what Odyssey looks like, (it does) and that you could detect all uses of Reshade by looking at the depth of field (it does not!)

I think the phrase you are looking for is "I could have been mistaken" before apologizing to varonica, but oh well!

 

[Morbad]

There is a lot of other games I play with superspampling/DSR (including Horizons I play at 2560x1080p 2xSS) - they have more "linear" correlation between resolution and performance.
In EDO its like... exponential.
Increasing resolution is causing performance drop way beyond expected and reasonable factor.

It's often less than linear for me, as at 1440p, or anything below it, there is some other bottleneck (which I would guess to be CPU, if changing CPU performance made much of a difference, or if any of my logical cores were fully loaded...but it doesn't and they aren't) around surface settlements that doesn't vanish until I become fillrate limited. After 1800p or so performance changes just about linearly with number of pixels being rendered all the way to at least 5k.

Your situation sounds like you are right on the edge of not having enough VRAM. The higher resolutions could be pushing you over.

Question for you, do you delete the graphics settings files each time after an update lands? I haven't done so for yesterday's 2 patches/hotfixes, and when I started playing (and throughout the game really) the general stutter and jank was a lot worse than before (even in SC/transitions). Unless the game just required to 'settle in' - didn't play all that long last night.

Not generally. I do clear the shader cache of whatever graphics drivers I'm using and reset the quality preset in the game options (which should be doing the same thing as deleting the the files, unless one has been sticking stuff in the GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml). The update process itself wipes the GPUWorkTable.xml file and resets any changes made to the core GraphicsConfiguration.xml.

The game might require some time to settle in as the graphics driver will have to recache compiled shaders, if it's shader cache features are enabled.

 

[hunvagy]

I don't think you know that that means: "in a clear and detailed manner, leaving no room for confusion or doubt."

Stating the opposite is not explicitly saying that not everyone uses it. The whole premise of your post was that Reshade usage presented an inaccurate presentation of what Odyssey looks like, (it does) and that you could detect all uses of Reshade by looking at the depth of field (it does not!)

I think the phrase you are looking for is "I could have been mistaken" before apologizing to varonica, but oh well!

Reshade. Which a lot of commanders use. It is exactly what the video describes, in a non hyperbolic manner. It is post processing, to make the game look better then it does. Does everyone in the screenshot thread use them? No, but you can see ReShade on some of them. Like when you spot the Depth of Field effect that does not exist in that shape or form in EDO.

Here my post that was quoted. Let me help you a bit, as it seems reading comprehension is lost on the forums nowadays. Bolded, italic, yellow. Hopefully it helps make it readable. Now tell me what those two sentences say, in your interpretation. Also, Depth of field was an example, and overuse of DoF is a hallmark of reshade presets.

And I'm most certainly won't apologize to randos on the internet, unless warranted.

 

[Just]

bottleneck (...) around surface settlements

This problem is something not directly related to GPU or CPU performance.

I have been relogging (for science, naturally) in a powered down mission settlement
some instances were with no NPCs and I had "normal" fps,
some with NPCs and it triggered fps drops that was absolutely irrelevant to GFX settings,
GPU and CPU usage was way below 100% and not a single core was 100% utilized.

Must be some NPC AI issue, there must be some flaw in code that make the "rest" of the game wait until NPC AI subroutines are finished or something similar.

 

[hunvagy]

This problem is something not directly related to GPU or CPU performance.

I have been relogging (for science, naturally) in a powered down mission settlement
some instances were with no NPCs and I had "normal" fps,
some with NPCs and it triggered fps drops that was absolutely irrelevant to GFX settings,
GPU and CPU usage was way below 100% and not a single core was 100% utilized.

Must be some NPC AI issue, there must be some flaw in code that make the "rest" of the game wait until NPC AI subroutines are finished or something similar.

Sadly it happens in space too. There is no reason, or explanation to have 30-40 fps in a Coriolis, when I'm entering and docking. It's exactly the same as it was in Horizons. Even if they increase texture resolution, it shouldn't cut the fps by 60%.

Also I just realized. The engine might not be just rendering the concourse, but at at least the full hangar and ship of every commander. Because if you check, you can target the Commander on foot, and their unmanned spacecraft while in your ship. Which is a) insane b) completely unnecessary.

 

[Ettanin]

Also I just realized. The engine might not be just rendering the concourse, but at at least the full hangar and ship of every commander. Because if you check, you can target the Commander on foot, and their unmanned spacecraft while in your ship. Which is a) insane b) completely unnecessary.

#InsertCulling

 

[Just]

Here my post that was quoted. (...)

Yes, in this case some contexts were "misaligned".

Video author manipulated the subject by showing ONLY those good looking EDO screenshots that were reshaded,
mentioned that SOME commanders are using reshade to beautify them,
and skipped the fact, that it's only a margin of cases,
most of screenshots on this forum are pure in-game ones, regular or high-quality in-game postprocessed
(we can argue if it's corresponding to in-game experience, but this was no subject at all up to now).

What obviously misleads his viewers to the conclusion that ALL great looking EDO screenshots are "faked".

But you have indeed "wrapped" this in a more reasonable proportions, so I would not stretch the (rightful) accusations towards video author to you.