Graphics Improvements

Which RTX card?

I have an RTX 3080, and the game runs at a solid 4k @ 120 Hz (which is my display's native resolution and refresh rate) without the GPU even getting warm. Only when I am on foot at a station the framerate might drop to somewhere around 90, perhaps even 80.
Laptop with dual gpu, rtx 3050. I figured to reconfigure connection between GPUs, and now it is 60 fps mostly. However, close to flowers it is "red-zone" still.
So what I say, creation of surrounding takes at least 50% of the my GPU as FPS shows. If it would be pre-designed scene it would be 0% additional power used.
 
Laptop with dual gpu, rtx 3050. I figured to reconfigure connection between GPUs, and now it is 60 fps mostly. However, close to flowers it is "red-zone" still.
So what I say, creation of surrounding takes at least 50% of the my GPU as FPS shows. If it would be pre-designed scene it would be 0% additional power used.
Well, that doesn't sound like a very "gaming" laptop, so low framerates are to be expected... :p
 
Well, that doesn't sound like a very "gaming" laptop, so low framerates are to be expected... :p
You miss the point. I say GPU is used not only for nice picture but it has other comparable tasks. Which means you cannot expect "modern graphics" because you should divide GPU power by 2.
 
Who says that's placeholder though? Adding variety must be done manually (lots of work) or procedural.

They dont say it, but it just makes sense that with millions of stations you'd have at least 2 textures for pillars.
I'd also say it'd be a lot of work, except they literally have a system in place to paint many planets once a system is generated, so maybe a bit of copy/paste of the code right? But really, there'd be some work to do it, but I'd say it'd be worth it. Monotony is not the spice of life, variety is!

Powerplay 2 will add more Concourse variety, but the sneak-previews show all the concourse layouts stay the same which is a pity. They could open up more areas of stations.

Back in 2015, there were only 2 station interior types (standard and fancy). Later they added agricultural, industrial, business, and asteroid interiors.

More is better. It'd be just that much better even if those station interiors had different layouts. Is the business one the one that looks touristy?
I recall when the asteroid ones were announced, they said there were a few of them. I went to them, expecting them to be different. No dice. Literally the same asteroid and port inside it. That could be when my insistence on adding variety started, actually.

The devs have a limited budget so they didn't spend resources on implementing smart AI for free-walking NPCs in Concourses. The current concourses are a small fraction of the entire station. If they add more sections then it makes sense to implement it.

They dont need to be smarter than they are now. I know if I step in front of one, they'll stop and be frustrated. Im saying add 7 more paths around the station. I can map those out, if they dont have the time to.
Yeah we only see bits of whats possible, and the bits they show, hint that more is possible.Fleet Carriers, when they first showed them, had those elevator pods able to take you to the front or rear end of the carrier.


The lighting (except the shadows bug) and the contrast look fine on my PC.
Is the shadows bug the same as light bleeding through the walls of buildings? It makes little sense to me why that issue exists, other than they want it to.
 
Is the shadows bug the same as light bleeding through the walls of buildings?
I can't answer that specifically, but my experience with shadows includes flickering (which I'm currently not sure if it still happens), and the equally or even more jarring one where a mountain suddenly stops casting a shadow randomly depending on where you're looking, or how your ship's shadow randomly disappears and then gets cast right in front of you, but only at a certain distance, once you are close enough to it. I notice it a lot with my Phantom where its shadow will be fully cast when I'm away from it but once I get back closer to the ship, it will only partially render in and move with me, as if it's tied to the character or something weird/stupid like that.
 
The lighting (except the shadows bug) and the contrast look fine on my PC.
Fair enough if you think it still looks "fine", especially after several years to get used to it, but Odyssey's lighting and contrast are a downgrade from Horizons. It's why Odyssey looks "darker", some details and parts of the image are just being lost. The actual lighting is broken in many places but most obviously around planets, to borrow some nice pictures from elsewhere:
1721866897132.jpeg
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Fair enough if you think it still looks "fine", especially after several years to get used to it, but Odyssey's lighting and contrast are a downgrade from Horizons. It's why Odyssey looks "darker", some details and parts of the image are just being lost. The actual lighting is broken in many places but most obviously around planets, to borrow some nice pictures from elsewhere:
View attachment 398070View attachment 398071
You say detail lost, I say way more realistic. The left picture is just what you can expect when looking at a dark object with no own light (planet) in front of a fusion furnace (sun). In a realworld eclipse you also can't make out the features of the moon as it sits in front of the sun. The graphics in Odyssey are a realism upgrade in every way. The one big thing still not working is multiple lightsources support.
 
You say detail lost, I say way more realistic. The left picture is just what you can expect when looking at a dark object with no own light (planet) in front of a fusion furnace (sun). In a realworld eclipse you also can't make out the features of the moon as it sits in front of the sun. The graphics in Odyssey are a realism upgrade in every way. The one big thing still not working is multiple lightsources support.
It requires something to reflect light to the dark side of the object. Such as the Earth for example.

In this case, is there anything reflecting light back at the planet? The ring maybe, but it seems way too thin to reflect that much light back.
 
You miss the point. I say GPU is used not only for nice picture but it has other comparable tasks. Which means you cannot expect "modern graphics" because you should divide GPU power by 2.

No where near half of GPU time is going to spent on anything other than rendering graphics, except during transient loading periods or shader compliation. And quite a few modern games use the GPU for terrain generation or physics.

If your frame rate tanks when looking at biological stuff and doesn't quickly recover, it's because rendering that stuff takes way more effort than it should. Probably a bad shader. Could also be overhead if you're borderline on VRAM. Most RTX 3050s only have 4GiB which is definitely not enough for Odyssey and the 6GiB parts aren't much better.

The lighting (except the shadows bug) and the contrast look fine on my PC.
You say detail lost, I say way more realistic.

Which end result is a better image in which scenarios is subjective, and Rainbro's example isn't a good one, but I'm sure Odyssey crushing details that are being rendered, even in situations where auto exposure/eye adaptation shouldn't be an issue. It's not as overt as it used to be though.

Is the shadows bug the same as light bleeding through the walls of buildings? It makes little sense to me why that issue exists, other than they want it to.

That was there even when shadows mostly worked. It's definitely a bug.
 
You say detail lost, I say way more realistic. The left picture is just what you can expect when looking at a dark object with no own light (planet) in front of a fusion furnace (sun). In a realworld eclipse you also can't make out the features of the moon as it sits in front of the sun. The graphics in Odyssey are a realism upgrade in every way. The one big thing still not working is multiple lightsources support.
The left one you identify as more realistic is from Horizons. The contrast being (effectively) darker is a seperate problem to the lighting being broken and causing stuff like you see in the right.
 
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I've been complaining my rig can't even play odyssey without hitching.
Windows 10 just told me my rig aint powerful enough to install windows 11 and I need to upgrade my rig. go figure :D
 
I've been complaining my rig can't even play odyssey without hitching.
Windows 10 just told me my rig aint powerful enough to install windows 11 and I need to upgrade my rig. go figure :D
YouTube is full of instructional videos on how to build a PC that's capable of running modern games at decent framerates at 1080p for really cheap. You don't necessarily need to spend US$2000 on a rig just to play EDO.
 
Fair enough if you think it still looks "fine", especially after several years to get used to it, but Odyssey's lighting and contrast are a downgrade from Horizons. It's why Odyssey looks "darker", some details and parts of the image are just being lost. The actual lighting is broken in many places but most obviously around planets, to borrow some nice pictures from elsewhere:
View attachment 398070View attachment 398071
There is not a camera or other, on earth, that can reproduce an image with the dynamic range of the image on the right, as for the one on the left, the dynamic range is still massive, probably far to much so to be 'realistic'. The human eye can see 16 F stops of dynamic range, the average camera now days can capture 6 at most, though you can make composite images from the raw data, this is essentially the same as multiple expositions, which is what telescopes do, and what photographers used to do, but of course you can not do this with motion film, without shooting with two cameras at once!
I've been complaining my rig can't even play odyssey without hitching.
Windows 10 just told me my rig aint powerful enough to install windows 11 and I need to upgrade my rig. go figure :D
There is an engineer in the SOL system, who can overclock your PC, for 10% more elite gaming fun!

And now for something completely different: Hey fellow Cmdr's! I just made dangerous and got a personal invite from the rather enigmatic Lori Jamerson; I can't wait to have her tinker with my modules!
 
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I was thinking about this again today, I can run at * 2 up sampling, and for the most part it is very smooth it looks gorgeous and the anti aliasing effect of doing this makes even the planetary orbit lines look nice, I'm running on a M1 ultra Mac Studio. The thing is that it drops frames from time to time, but in a way that suggests that it is how the code is running that is causing this, where my system is easily capable of running at this setting; If the hardware was being used well. I'd really love to have the game written for this machine, that would be so cool.

The issue with frame dropping from time to time, is only really in two cases, combat and super cruise overcharge.
The latter could be solved by having key presses read on a different loop from the game image rendering, but likely this would be impossible to add after the fact. The point being that when you try to turn it off, if there is a stagger due to the graphics, your key press is not registered :|

As for the styling, that can be changed to taste if the coders decide to update ships. But I think they are great, love that some look like old worn second hand cars and other have carbon finishes, some look like super yacht interiors, really is a nice and varied selection.
Do you have a simple tutorial to get the game running?

I have an M3 Max MBP and would love to see how it fares.
 
You likely have better ray tracing than me, but similar cpu and gpu core count. My ram memory bandwidth is far better, but likely is unused by this program. The memory bandwidth on this thing is incredible, but none use it :(
I studied this before adjusting my settings :
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7efYzpquIs

Once you grok what everything does, then you tweak to your own system.

On mac's the thermal throttling makes a massive difference, and this cooling is different for each device range; So you will have to find which is optimal for you.

One of the major factors, and this is covered in the part on AA in the video linked above, is the screen resolution and consequent AA settings.

If you have a high res screen your requirements will be different to mine, though I'm on Mac, I do not have a Mac monitor and my resolution is standard. As such my requirements for AA will be different to those of someone with a high res or ultra res screen.

For the most part, all the settings are maxed out, but a few that don't really do anything other than use resources have been lowered. I'm fairly sure those were explained in the video above.

Give me a shout if they are not, and I'll dig into the settings again to see which ones ive lowered.

addendum: Oh and the amount of ram that you have will be critical, as the GPU and CPU are sharing the resources on these systems.
 
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Do you have a simple tutorial to get the game running?

I have an M3 Max MBP and would love to see how it fares.
Oh, and on a MBP, if you can stick an extra cooling device on it some how, you will likely get some significant performance boost.
 
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