Let's remember this is a DLC to a 7 year old game, not a brand new standalone one. You need Horizons if you want to play it.
I appreciate that, but the engine has been updated. I think the new lighting system is head and shoulders better than the system in Horizons, which is a 6 year old engine. There are also more detailed models and larger textures.
Horizons runs perfectly acceptable to me at 1080p all things considered. I knew of course that EDO wouldn't match that but it's still shocking how bad it still is, after 9 (!) updates now. There is absolutely nothing on display that justifies that sort of performance hit.
I don't know if you remember, but the Horizons update also significantly upped the system requirements. I updated from my ageing GTX 670 2GB, and even then a triple head setup for Horizons brought my brand spaking new GTX 970 to its knees. We have more detailed models, higher resolution textures, significantly improved lighting (it really is much better!) and lots of new animations.
As for min specs, have those changed again? I thought it was a 780 or some such? Regardless, I still remember the words quite well how the game should run on the same hardware at performance similar to Horizons (would be a reasonable expectation given the DLC nature). This is nowhere near similar.
You're right - I was confusing my games. Battlefield 2042's minimum is a 1050 Ti. The recommended card for Odyssey is a GTX 1060 6GB.
However, I would point out that minimum and recommended specifications are often interpreted as "will run at 720p/30fps low" for minumum and "will run at 1080p/60fps high" for recommended. I can't speak to the minimum requirements, because I don't have a machine approaching them, but performance is now nearing that for the recommended; I get close to 60 fps in most situations now with my laptop, whose CPU and GPU are weaker than the desktop variants.
You are, of course, correct about the requirements, although IIRC the actual wording was that FD were
aiming for similar requirements to Horizons, and the pre-release specifications reflected this until shortly before alpha went live. That's not a defense - I think what angered the community the most was the lack of transparency about the update; I didn't play the game for four months. The lack of transparency certainly annoyed the hell out of me. But things are what they are. The game should not have been released in the state it was, but it was. I do wonder what issues there were during development (apart from the obvious one) that led to the update releasing like that.
With that said, given that a GTX 780/R9 280x are the minimums, a
2GB 960m would always struggle.
Anyways, it was just an experiment but despite tempered expectations it still managed to limbo underneath those.
And playing this at 720p with its awful aliasing and the fact that medium settings default SS to 0.5 (I don't think Horizons does this? Would need to check) makes this a seriously ugly mess to look at, and text very difficult to read.
I tried playing Fortnite on my wife's old GTX 650m laptop once. It wasn't pretty, but it ran.
