Hi folks! Like many here, I've played all of the Elite games from the beginning, and they've always been my favourite without a doubt. I've been following the dev diaries and news letters since the start, and last week I impulsively bought a DK2 and an X52 so I can play on my old Core i7 950 (x52 mobo). I was completely blown away when I plugged in the rift and played through the tutorials with Beta 3.03 and now 3.04, but I had to run the game on low settings, which still looks totally amazing tbh. Since then I've spent more time upgrading and becoming obsessive about frame rates and latency than I have actually properly testing the game (because of my newly found frame rate OCD).
I thought some of you might be interested in hearing my hardware configs and performance perceptions with them if you're wondering how your hardware will run Elite. In each case, the performance was with me sitting in the hanger in the tutorial 'Travel', and then heading out into the training system to check out the planets and asteroid rings. I don't tend to over clock anything either...
Starting point:
Core I7 950 (3.06Ghz)
MSI GTX 590
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth X58
HD: SATA (old fashioned) spinning HD
12Gb DDR3
Auzentech Prelude 7.1
On low settings, with the above hardware I was able to get very smooth and non-vomit inducing game play with the rift! With the High and Mid presets there was a LOT of lag and the frame rate was very low with FPS under 20, but on the low settings, the frame rate appeared to be totally and completely smooth, with some initial judder after spawning, or pauses when approaching a planet. So, if any of you are wondering whether you can run the rift on a 5 year old PC, the answer is totally yes, but keep the settings down. Initially I was getting unplayable frame rates on all settings, but I discovered with MSI afterburner that my card was running at 100 degrees C and throttling back, so I made a new fan profile for it and took the side off my case and it was then happy (also, my 3d mark 11 graphics score went from 2500 to 9000!).
My curiosity started to get the better of me with the high graphics settings though because I want to experience Elite in the best way possible. It was possible for me to play on high in open space, but the lag is just too much for the rift. At this point I upgraded the GTX590 to try to increase the frame rates, and also put in an SSD to try to reduce the lag approaching planets. New hardware:
Samsung 840 EVO 500Gb SSD
2 x GTX 980 in SLI
(also removed Auzentech prelude because there was no longer any room to access the PCI slot...)
Now I find that there's a lot more lag when I first spawn in the travel tutorial. It takes about 5 seconds before everything smoothes out, but when it does, it's now totally completely smooth in space, asteroid fields, in the station, with no judder on the high settings. So, overall this upgrade was a good result, and I recommend these GPUs to any 'rifters' who want to run Elite with the high presets. I was hoping that the SSD would improve pauses when approaching planets however, and I haven't really noticed any difference in performance in Elite since installing it (other than Windows loading very quickly). Also, (a bit OT) the on-board sound from the mobo seems really lacking though, so I've ordered a sound blaster zxr.
Although I've largely got what I wanted, I had Afterburner open while testing, and I did discover that the GPUs were never exceeding 70% usage. I also found that some of the processor cores were maxing out occasionally, and so while this proves that an old computer can run Elite on high settings (if you stuff enough GPUs in there!), it doesn't make best use of the hardware and the old CPU will cause a bottleneck.
I've now ordered a Core i7 4790, and a Sabertooth Z97 mobo, in the hope that it'll help with the initial spawn judder and reduce lag when approaching planets etc. If anyone's interested in whether that makes a difference, I'll post an update.
I thought some of you might be interested in hearing my hardware configs and performance perceptions with them if you're wondering how your hardware will run Elite. In each case, the performance was with me sitting in the hanger in the tutorial 'Travel', and then heading out into the training system to check out the planets and asteroid rings. I don't tend to over clock anything either...
Starting point:
Core I7 950 (3.06Ghz)
MSI GTX 590
Mobo: Asus Sabertooth X58
HD: SATA (old fashioned) spinning HD
12Gb DDR3
Auzentech Prelude 7.1
On low settings, with the above hardware I was able to get very smooth and non-vomit inducing game play with the rift! With the High and Mid presets there was a LOT of lag and the frame rate was very low with FPS under 20, but on the low settings, the frame rate appeared to be totally and completely smooth, with some initial judder after spawning, or pauses when approaching a planet. So, if any of you are wondering whether you can run the rift on a 5 year old PC, the answer is totally yes, but keep the settings down. Initially I was getting unplayable frame rates on all settings, but I discovered with MSI afterburner that my card was running at 100 degrees C and throttling back, so I made a new fan profile for it and took the side off my case and it was then happy (also, my 3d mark 11 graphics score went from 2500 to 9000!).
My curiosity started to get the better of me with the high graphics settings though because I want to experience Elite in the best way possible. It was possible for me to play on high in open space, but the lag is just too much for the rift. At this point I upgraded the GTX590 to try to increase the frame rates, and also put in an SSD to try to reduce the lag approaching planets. New hardware:
Samsung 840 EVO 500Gb SSD
2 x GTX 980 in SLI
(also removed Auzentech prelude because there was no longer any room to access the PCI slot...)
Now I find that there's a lot more lag when I first spawn in the travel tutorial. It takes about 5 seconds before everything smoothes out, but when it does, it's now totally completely smooth in space, asteroid fields, in the station, with no judder on the high settings. So, overall this upgrade was a good result, and I recommend these GPUs to any 'rifters' who want to run Elite with the high presets. I was hoping that the SSD would improve pauses when approaching planets however, and I haven't really noticed any difference in performance in Elite since installing it (other than Windows loading very quickly). Also, (a bit OT) the on-board sound from the mobo seems really lacking though, so I've ordered a sound blaster zxr.
Although I've largely got what I wanted, I had Afterburner open while testing, and I did discover that the GPUs were never exceeding 70% usage. I also found that some of the processor cores were maxing out occasionally, and so while this proves that an old computer can run Elite on high settings (if you stuff enough GPUs in there!), it doesn't make best use of the hardware and the old CPU will cause a bottleneck.
I've now ordered a Core i7 4790, and a Sabertooth Z97 mobo, in the hope that it'll help with the initial spawn judder and reduce lag when approaching planets etc. If anyone's interested in whether that makes a difference, I'll post an update.