980 upgrade to 1080 (not TI). Is it worth it?

[Older Gamer]

I have a problem at the moment when I enter the galaxy map, the screen tends to lock up and I get the hourglass appearing.

This has been a problem for me since I attempted to go from Colonia to the galactic core, so I am guessing it is the sheer amount of stars in the map that is chocking my system. This is never a problem when I am in the bubble.

So, now that 1080 cards are beginning to dip a little in price on eBay (presumably mining is no longer the hot thing to do) I thought perhaps an upgrade from my workhorse of a 980 to a 1080 might help releave this problem?

Any one have any thoughts on this?

I am running an Oculus Rift with three sensors, works fine (performance wise) with Beat Saber, Pavlov VR and other games of this ilk, also with racing games like Project cars.

The rest of my system is as follows:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770S CPU @ 3.10GHz, 3101 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Installed Physical Memory (RAM) 32.0 GB
OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro

 

[Morbad]

I would highly recommend tweaking the galaxy map settings (there are quite a few options exposed in the .xml files) before laying out money on a major hardware upgrade, if this is your main complaint.

 

[lreese]

^^ seconded. Galaxy map to low settings, and then see from there. It's all eye-candy anyway.

 

[Micha]

If the Galaxy Map is your only concern then yeah, tweaking is a good first step.

But if money is no object, the 1080 is a lot faster than the 980, it's more equivalent to a 980Ti although it's a bit faster than that as well. Might allow you to up some of the other settings as well.

 

[Older Gamer]

Must have missed the Galaxy map settings? Where are they? In graphics settings?

 

[lreese]

You can just use one of the premade graphic settings for VR. Even on VR Ultra the Galaxy map is low, if I recall correctly.

 

[CylonSurfer]

I have the galmap set to low on my 1080Ti, anything above has always been a little stuttery in particular when first opened.

 

[Older Gamer]

Finally managed to get back to the game (real life got in the way - again) and I found that my Galaxy map settings were already on low.

So I set VR to low, then customised everything to be off or low and applied it! This made no difference. Still, I had the problem of the map being basically unusable if I was zoomed in near the core.

Second I tried turning off all the labels, bookmarks, grid and star names, the lot. This DID make a difference. I can now move about the Gal Map, zoom into the core, and stuff.

However, with everything turned off, label-wise, navigation to a specific star (entered into the search bar in the map screen) is very difficult, nye on impossible. I can get to roughly where I want to navigate towards, but not the exact star.

Still, it has me on the way to the core, maybe I can figure out a better solution when I get there.

But all of this made me think, is this a sign that it's not really my graphics card that's the bottleneck. Could it be the bottleneck is my hard drive? A 7,200rpm HDD. Would an SSD help here? If so, what's a good fast SSD that can be used just to store and run games?

 

[Morbad]

Could it be the bottleneck is my hard drive? A 7,200rpm HDD.

What's the hard drive activity look like?

Would an SSD help here?

An SSD would help a lot, regardless and there is very little excuse to be using an HDD for anything other than archival, backups, or media storage.

If so, what's a good fast SSD that can be used just to store and run games?

Generally, the cheapest newer model you can find of acceptable size.

Any modern, name brand SSD will be fast enough to get well into diminishing returns as far as game loading goes.

 

[Micha]

But all of this made me think, is this a sign that it's not really my graphics card that's the bottleneck. Could it be the bottleneck is my hard drive? A 7,200rpm HDD. Would an SSD help here? If so, what's a good fast SSD that can be used just to store and run games?

Run a system profiler.

It won't be your HDD since the game runs in RAM - the galaxy map is generated on the fly, not loaded in. So the issue could be your CPU as well. But without profiling to see where your system is hitting the limits it's just guesswork.

I haven't tried zooming into the core yet on my system while in VR; might try it when I get home. It's definitely noticeably slower than the outer regions while in 2D though!

(i6700K, GTX1080, 32GB RAM).

----

EDIT: An SSD will, in general, provide a HUGE performance boost to a PC though. So definitely one of the better upgrades to consider. But apart from loading* times I doubt it will help much with Elite.

Edit2: * - initial loading times. Elite doesn't have traditional "maps" or "levels" so doesn't load those in as-needed as most other games do. Not entirely sure whether or not they stream assets in as-needed, but compared to most other games, there's hardly any textures or models so I wouldn't think so. Interesting question though, I'll profile my HDD activity while running Elite. But I run it off both SSD and HDD (multiple installs, SSD too small to hold them all) and haven't noticed any real performance difference in-game.

 

[Older Gamer]

My computer has an SSD for the OS, which also appears to be the location of the Oculus Client software.

ED is stored on a HDD with 7,200 rpm, I use it for video as well and it's always given great performance for that.

Just ran the game with the system rescource monitor going and really the whole system seemed to be fine, even with the map freezing... Maybe I just need to uninstall and reinstall?

 

[Gortron]

My computer has an SSD for the OS, which also appears to be the location of the Oculus Client software.

ED is stored on a HDD with 7,200 rpm, I use it for video as well and it's always given great performance for that.

Just ran the game with the system rescource monitor going and really the whole system seemed to be fine, even with the map freezing... Maybe I just need to uninstall and reinstall?

Having ED on an SSD or even better an M.2 drive was definitely noticeable when I switched (especially the M.2 drive). The judder when dropping out at stations for example completely went with the move to M.2.

The egg timer when jumping near the core is server side, I don’t think anything you do to your PC will stop it. As for the galaxy map the biggest improvement to my system for that was when I upgraded from a i5 4670K to an i7 8700k. It was a bigger performance improvement to the map then the GTX 970 to GTX 1080 I think. Near the core though the map can still struggle a bit.

For general performance the 970 to 1080 was a huge boost and I’d expect you to enjoy a similar difference with the 980 to 1080. But if it the map that’s the main issue I think the CPU may well come into play too.

 

[Older Gamer]

So I uninstalled Elite Dangerous today, cleared out all the User directories of 'stuff' and then reinstalled.... And..... That seems to have worked. I now have a fully working Galaxy map, no matter what labels are displayed, or indeed how many stars there are. Not had a chance to do a full performance test, still setting up the key bindings which have vanished, or at least won't let me load the back up!!! Just not there in the drop down option.

The game is now installed to an SSD, a small one, which is why I was reluctant to put it there in the first place. I will have to buy a bigger one for all my games I guess.

VR. Worse than guitars for GAS.

But thank you team for all your help and advice. Helped to prod me in the right direction to find a solution.

Now all I need to do is find the Galaxy core... Don't tell me, second star on the right and straight on till morning...

 

[Space Dandy]

Hang a left at the 3rd Rock from the Sun then straight on till mornin!