Boost your graphics performance in Elite Dangerous Odyssey using these simple tricks

[CMDR Corlas]

actually it make me less hopeful. This analysis has basically same conclusions as the one for alpha had - which indicates that devs did little changes / optimisation on this regard between alpha nd release. That suggests the issue is either quite complicated or they dont know how to fix it (cause otherwise they already would). But thats just me speculating of course

No, what that means is that the devs were overworked or misworked. Most of the focus and effort was taken up fixing other bugs. You don't release a massive update like this and be complacent about it, I know that's often the accusation, but it's rarely the reality.

They know how to fix it, because they're known and understood issues. At that point it's a project management issue more than anything.

 

[Rinkyrooby]

Resetting the graphics folder will do nothing for me given it's a fresh install via the frontier launcher. I had to install afresh due to the fact that it refused to launch via steam. However, it was ok in pancake, but would not output video or sound to my quest, which as I play in VR, was not very handy.
I would imagine that they fine well knew that it wasn't ready for release, but pressure was brought so that it was released, given the previous delay. Not the devs fault, as, no doubt as we speak, they will be firefighting all the worst issues.
You can see it is unfinished and rushed. Even small things like the red/green lights on the mail slot are missing inside the stations. Never mind crashes and disconnections; it has janky transitioning between the various hyperspace/supercruise/normal space modes - at one point i was leaving a planet surface, pressed supercruise and i was suddenly 360'd towards the planet surface which my FAS bounced off and somehow survived. Even if you lineup perfectly with a station in supercuise and exit (<1000km) you are papped in a random location at the station.
Without going looking, I have encountered quite a few bugs and strange gui decisions.
I can just about see the game that it will be, just a shame I'll have to wait a good while before it's anywhere near where it should have been at launch.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Holy crap.. apologies for possibly leading you astray.. but the latest nvidia drivers 466.47 make a huge difference again.

To the point im currently turning down from mr brabens ultra rather than going up from low or medium. For my machine, shadows seem to be the most sensitive setting. Also some settings seem to like it when you jump out and jump in again...

 

[The Lawful]

Holy crap, did david braben claim hes playing on a 980 at ultra settings? If you want to assume hes not lieing or being lied to himself..

Lets get to the bottom of it. Is anyone else getting that? I can only think of driver versions that could make the difference. Also the 980 is maxwell architecture.. that shouldn't make a difference as more modern ones have drastic improvements in areas such as memory bandwidth etc.

Is anyone able to get 1080p at ultra on lower end cards? If you can.. would be great to know the precise specs and driver version. There's not that much you can do on the OS side...

And rivatuner is telling me 100% gpu usage even capped at 30 so....

He can't have been lieing.

No, I think he didn't lie, though I simply can't find out why. My card is an ASUS ROG STRIX GTX1070 8GB from 2016 (such lots of caps, much wow).

Pancake mode, ULTRA, 1080p:

In pancake mode, I get 190+ fps in space, stable 60-70 on planets and so on. 45fps (at the bar) is the lowest I could get. On ULTRA. If I would only play in this mode, I'd say "buttersmooth", what are people complaining about at all. That's likely what Braben experienced.

BUT: in VR, it's pure disaster. Oculus CV1, VR low settings.

In VR, 45fps is the best I get, and that's deep space, with just the cockpit and black sky ahead. Still the card is struggling to maintain ASW even. Inside stations, 20 fps are it, and I had to quit with nausea and that specific VR headache for the first time in 5 years because the card could not even maintain AWS. Did a test flight in deep space with Oculus Debug tool enabled (providing a nice overlay in the HMD showing frame rates, dropped frames and Performance overhead). Oculus says it demands up to 300% more GPU power (in deep space, mind you), 150% is the minimum (external cam, ship out of the way, just black sky), runs on ASW all the time, drops all kinds of frames and so on.

In Horizons, I get stable 90+ fps in Space and stable 45fps ASW on planets, stations and everywhere else, played for more than three hours in a Guardian structure in VR and it was butter smooth and fun in that gloomy fog, fighting drones in the dawn. Well, I really doubt we will see the same in Odyssey, 300% is beyond a 3090 and that's black sky + cockpit only.

Latest NVIDIA drivers, ofc.

O7,

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Okay, so i fixed my potatoe. Completely playable framerates.. Details in case this helps others:

Specs: 2500k @4.1, 1060 3gb!!, 16 ram, windows 10.

Most relevant tweaks:

• Update drivers to the very latest, 466.47
• Delete graphics xmls as advised by frontier post.
• Copy over the horizons graphicsconfiguration.xml from this thread https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/boost-your-odessy-fps.577674/

This seems to have lowered the ambient occulsion quality accross the board, but the fps boost is very tangble.

Most relevant settings: I used the ultra preset as advised by mr braben, and turned a few things down:

• Resolution: 1920x1200
• Model draw distance: Keep this at MAXIMUM to avoid the blocky triangles. All i noticed as increased cpu usage, still not maxxing out my little cpu.
• Texture filtering: Down to 2 or 4 anios, its a minor performance gain but you may care about this on planet surfaces to leave it higher.
• Shadown quality: Medium. On my machine, as soon as i set it to high or greater even the mouse cursor started lagging. On medium its full responsiveness like horizons.
• Blur off
• Environment quality to high
• Depth of field off
• Terrain quality to high
• Terrain work to around 1/3rd.. this was pretty huge too. You may need to quit the program and restart from windows for this setting?
• Volumetric effects quality to low.

fps never dips under 30 in stations now. the space game is as horizons was.

Odysee is finally playable..! Wow.

Spoiler

I kinda wish i hadn't done this though. I know for certain i have no interest in odysee. At all. The space skybox is completely bad. Rubbish. There is no space game anymore. Planet surfaces look TERRIBLE until you land on them. The galaxy and system maps are horrific. No thanks. While my machine didn't run it, there was always some hope the game could still be okay. "oof" as they say. Can't believe that's where its ended up. The space game is absolutely ruined in the visuals Also switching between hotas and kbm is so dumb.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

Whatever they did in the third hotfix completely broke performance for low end machines again. It does look better. David brabens machine should no longer work.

Also im getting stress palpitations every time i look at the black pixels of space. Nothing but black. Approach a body on the night side. Im absolutely horrified white knights were defending this during the alpha. Such stabbling yourself in the face.

I was supposed to step away. Thanks frontier

 

[Rinkyrooby]

Lowering graphics settings (and the more obscure ones, thanks CMDR Karrde Sun) has improved my framerates somewhat re previous post. The Yamiks, recently did a post on youtube that showed that there has been zero optimization completed on odyssey, however he did qualify that, if I remember correctly, that there wasn't a whole lot done on previous versions either. Going on from that, anecdotally, my first impressions of the game when changing to odyssey was that the texture detail had been somewhat increased - you only have to look at station windows as you enter to see that there are more pixels.

 

[CMDR Karrde Sun]

More tinkering, love tinkering. Please stop following my pied pipers unless it interests you, because im only documenting progress.

Next step: Nvidia 466.27 is tangibly better than 466.47. Using low latency: Ultra, prefer maximum performance, and triple buffering forced on.

Some more datas:

• With the 27 drivers and the lastest fix at 30/5, in the tutorial im alble to get the best experience so far, up until the building with the fire. After the fires are put out and upstairs, there's nothing i can do to bring that fps back up to 25+ with a low frame time which its currently doing.
• Ive been testing medium textures and terrain, which puts the gpu memory usage well under (2.4ish like horizons) the 3gb limit on my card. Being under the physical gpu memory doesn't make any difference on my setup, looks like the general optimisation is still a problem before any gpu memory bottlneck.
• There's no point in spending too much time on this. Reminds me of the witcher 3... people spent months tweaking ini files to improve the IQ and one day they just patched it to work and hundreds of hours of trial and error was wasted. I think there's a reasonable chance this will happen with elite as well.
• Speaking of w3, while i've been changing drivers, ive been firing up a same save of w3 to correlate any differences in elite.. odysee has been too unchoherent and possibly subject to other bugs to be firm about driver changes. Intersting that on the exact same machine, w3 runs consistently at double the framerate (same res, ultra except shadows, heavy reshade ontop). Given the different league of detail and features that w3 has over odysee, it will never be acceptable to accept even 30 fps for whats being drawn as anything but unfinished. Its strongly damning that david braben would even pull out a card saying they were targeting 30 fps as minimum, given the rest of the gaming inudstry exists and 30 fps has never ever been suggested in the same sales pitch as elite. Also, its looking certain that the minimum requirements do not hit 30fps under any circumstances, let alone the recommended.

 

[_bryan]

Hello,

Is there any way to disable shadows entirely? That's how I had it in the old game, because it causes lag for me.

My radeon drivers are up to date. 21.5.2

 

[DWorth]

I've been tinkering around with this. Updated my Nvidia drivers to 466.47 for my GTX 1060. Performance in space was stuttering a little. However I went back to Horizons and updated that then went back into Odyssey and performance in space is fine aside from occasional delays transitioning from supercruise to normal space which I suspect is a server side issue. This makes no sense...

Performance on foot on planet surfaces and abandoned settlements is fine.

The real performance hits seem to occur in stations and in and around surface settlements with active NPCs. I get serious frame issues pop-up and LOD issues, very stuttery performance including crackly sound and NPC speech that seems to play at half speed. Frame rates are very inconsistent even when coming into land. NPCs on surface settlements also seem to get stuck on the scenery a lot. Turning down graphics options doesn't seem to make that much of a difference here. I also noticed that the HDD was thrashing a lot in these locations. Perfmon.exe shows that the page file is getting hammered, but RAM is nowhere near maxing out (only roughly 60% usage).

It does make me wonder whether the issues aren't purely graphics related and whether the NPC behaviour is causing some bottlenecks.

 

[_bryan]

Turning down graphics options doesn't seem to make that much of a difference here. I also noticed that the HDD was thrashing a lot in these locations.

I have 64GB RAM and had that same problem. However, I noticed that if I go into settings and choose one of the "presets" like "VR Low" or "VR Medium" that problem seems to go away entirely. I'm guessing I had something set too high, like FX or texture quality.

 

[Bonsaipanda]

Is there any way to disable shadows entirely?

There is - it makes the game look like even more dogsht than the lowest settings and it doesn't improve performance. The issue is not the shadows, the issue is everything still being rendered around the player, even when not visible.

 

[_bryan]

There is

Can you tell me how? When I'm at that menu in the new game, I only see low/med/high. I don't see "disabled" anymore.

I know the game looks bad without shadows but allows me to use 1.25 HMD quality which helps my graphics A LOT. Otherwise I see the jagged lines everywhere.

 

[Bonsaipanda]

Can you tell me how?

Sure.

Make a backup copy of
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml

And then replace the contents with >>

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?> <GraphicsConfig> <Shadows_Low> <Profile_General> <SliceSize>1024</SliceSize> <NumFrustums>0</NumFrustums> <FrustumCockpit> <DepthBias>0.00008</DepthBias> <DepthSlopeBias>5.0</DepthSlopeBias> <FilterKernelSize>3.0</FilterKernelSize> </FrustumCockpit> <Frustum0> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum0> <Frustum1> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum1> </Profile_General> <Profile_PlanetApproach> <SliceSize>1024</SliceSize> <NumFrustums>0</NumFrustums> <CrossFadeCascades>false</CrossFadeCascades> <FrustumCockpit> <DepthBias>0.00008</DepthBias> <DepthSlopeBias>5.0</DepthSlopeBias> <FilterKernelSize>3.0</FilterKernelSize> </FrustumCockpit> <Frustum0> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum0> <Frustum1> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum1> </Profile_PlanetApproach> <Profile_PlanetSurface> <SliceSize>1024</SliceSize> <NumFrustums>0</NumFrustums> <FrustumZeroCanBeOverridden>1</FrustumZeroCanBeOverridden> <FrustumCockpit> <DepthBias>0.00003</DepthBias> <DepthSlopeBias>5.0</DepthSlopeBias> <FilterKernelSize>3.0</FilterKernelSize> </FrustumCockpit> <Frustum0> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum0> <Frustum1> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum1> </Profile_PlanetSurface> <Profile_StationInterior> <SliceSize>1024</SliceSize> <NumFrustums>0</NumFrustums> <FrustumCockpit> <DepthBias>0.00008</DepthBias> <DepthSlopeBias>5.0</DepthSlopeBias> <FilterKernelSize>3.0</FilterKernelSize> </FrustumCockpit> <Frustum0> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum0> </Profile_StationInterior> <Profile_AsteroidField> <SliceSize>1024</SliceSize> <NumFrustums>0</NumFrustums> <FrustumCockpit> <DepthBias>0.00008</DepthBias> <DepthSlopeBias>5.0</DepthSlopeBias> <FilterKernelSize>3.0</FilterKernelSize> </FrustumCockpit> <Frustum0> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum0> <Frustum1> <EndDistance>0</EndDistance> </Frustum1> </Profile_AsteroidField> </Shadows_Low> </GraphicsConfig>

I know the game looks bad without shadows but allows me to use 1.25 HMD quality which helps my graphics A LOT. Otherwise I see the jagged lines everywhere.

It probably won't give you enough boost to push the supersampling up - if you have an NVidia card, you might get better performance from the driver's supersampling instead of Elite's internal one.

 

[_bryan]

It probably won't give you enough boost to push the supersampling up - if you have an NVidia card, you might get better performance from the driver's supersampling instead of Elite's internal one.

Thank you very much.

I did it and I guess it worked. I'm able to have 1.25 HMD quality now.

The space station stuff is still slow FPS, but outside flying around it gets smooth again.

 

[Mogen Teras]

If I had to go through this many steps just to get my framerate to go above 30 for a 6 year old game, I'd just drop the game and play something else.

Oh wait that IS what i did

 

[_bryan]

just to get my framerate to go above 30 for a 6 year old game

It's above 30 in the space stuff, just not the station. Which is the brand new part where they made their changes.

To me it's a good tradeoff.

* Remove the [ shadows + jagged lines ]

in exchange for

* [ smooth FPS (40) + smooth lines ].

If I could afford the next GPU I would, but I don't want to spend another 1k on a GPU which is what I just did last year.

 

[Popalu]

I'm just not seeing these issues others are, getting stable 60+fps in stations and settlements, with 120+fps in space, on desktop mode at 4k and in VR via Quest

I wonder what is different for my set-ups, that seems to work. Using latest 466.77 drivers, so apart from the "CinemaScope" view in VR which makes me feel sick, when moving between space and surfaces and the missing mountains from Horizons, not seeing too many issues

 

[Turd Ferguson]

4) load Horizons,

 

[CaptainPugwash]

I'm just not seeing these issues others are, getting stable 60+fps in stations and settlements, with 120+fps in space, on desktop mode at 4k and in VR via Quest

I wonder what is different for my set-ups, that seems to work. Using latest 466.77 drivers, so apart from the "CinemaScope" view in VR which makes me feel sick, when moving between space and surfaces and the missing mountains from Horizons, not seeing too many issues

Please provide graphics settings, or better still xml file, could be useful for someone (not me, asking for a friend )