Well well well. Finally managed to boot up the game on my laptop (i7 6700, GTX960m 4GB, 8GB RAM, latest GPU drivers just to be sure). This plays Horizons at a very stable 30-45fps locked at ~High settings and 1080p. I'm not expecting miracles.
Docked in the station (in Solo, just to make sure there's no network interference), and reducing settings to medium (0.5SS applied by default?! - took that back to 1.0, aliasing is already bad enough as it is, this makes text almost unreadable) - because that is as low as I'm prepared to go in terms of eye-candy - it barely hits 30. Okay. Concourse, similar with more frequent drops into the red zone, down to 20 quite often. Going up and down like a yoyo but never above 30. The input lag and stutter is immense, as I'm used to my g-sync monitor smoothening out things quite a bit as EDO is anything but consistent
anywhere really. Back to ship and framerate goes up to 50, then down to 30ish. And everything looks just
horrible. Can't see the wood from the jaggies at times.
Off into SC to visit a nearby settlement. There, it can hit 60fps, but only just about, and only briefly. it drops to around 30ish intermittently, very very janky and inconsistent, I can't tell why, maybe the new planet tech? But it looks so low-res and poor. Approach to settlement is accompanied by lots of stutter and micro-freezes. The closer to the surface I get, the lower the framerate drops. Once docked, and walking around the settlement, it settles (hur dur) at around 11-12fps. I quit to desktop at that stage and will never boot up EDO on this machine again. Even if it ran at a steady framerate at those settings, it looks so absolutely terrible I wouldn't really want to play this, and certainly not over Horizons.
I mean, I realise the laptop isn't top spec but this is a bit too much. It's quite literally unplayable, at
medium settings, as I was fumbling the settlement approach due to input lag and accidentally boosted into the landing pad (instead of getting the landing gear out - XBO pad here). While everything (and I do mean,
everything) looks like complete arx, awful aliasing combined with artifacts and whatnot. It's not merely almost, but 100% comical.
If I had played the Alpha on this computer, which was my Elite machine no problemo for the past years before I upgraded to my desktop (which I can see now seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting particularly my g-sync monitor!), this would've been an insta-refund. And performance is supposed to be a fair bit better now! Boy oh boy.
I guess there's three takeaways from this.
1) I will not play Odyssey for a few weeks (can't bring my desktop with me... no big deal as such, X4 runs just fine on high settings) and Horizons will have to do for my Elite itch, even if it's just to quickly grab any free Arx should they feature again this Christmas
2) I do feel for those PC players who were misled by the minimum/recommended specs - and as for consoles, well... "oof" is all I will say.
3) There really is no need to change my CMDR name anytime soon
