Graphics Improvements

I suppose it depends on how you elect to measure, but even a mid-range mirrorless camera these days has around 12 stops of Dynamic Range... (my 'better' camera claims 14 stops)
OH nice! It has been likely a decade since I checked up on this kind of info, so I'm woefully out of date, but yes still not quite up to the ability of the humans eye, and is something that you do still need to be aware of.

Now, the dark side of the moon, compared to staring at the sun, is about ... Well I've no idea how many F stops, let me ask a Chatty bot to see what they say ... Well Chatty GPT reckons that there are 26.6 F-stops between the dark side of the moon and direct sunlight :)
 
OH nice! It has been likely a decade since I checked up on this kind of info, so I'm woefully out of date, but yes still not quite up to the ability of the humans eye, and is something that you do still need to be aware of.
Some of the really quite expensive full frame cameras (I use crop sensor as I'm old and like less weight!) claim 18+ stops, the rear illuminated sensors are good! ( I say claim as I can't prove my own, let alone a £5,000+ one)
Now, the dark side of the moon, compared to staring at the sun, is about ... Well I've no idea how many F stops, let me ask a Chatty bot to see what they say ... Well Chatty GPT reckons that there are 26.6 F-stops between the dark side of the moon and direct sunlight :)
Sunglasses & torch stuff...
 
When you think about it, this really is what makes the corona of eclipse so utterly amazing, I mean when else can you see something as dazzling as this? Well ... other than when hit by an appropriately engineered weapon.

My camera is an old cannon D1 full frame, was the bomb at the time, you can squeeze 6 F-stops from the raw files, if you can find something that can still open them. Amazing progress on this in recent years, it completely changes the art of photography, I used to shoot on colour slide film, that has 2 F-stops of range, so if you don't really think about your shot, you can destroy the slide so very easily.
 
You name it ! It's totally ridiculous of MS... 🤦‍♂️ :confused:
Tangent:

I disagree. While your PC is still usable, it is not midrange any more. It does suck that MS will not be allowing you to continue on to Windows 11.

But the cutoff for Intel chips that have built-in TPM 2.0 is the 8000 series.

So you have 7000 series or older. The 7700k was released in Q1 2017.

Your PC is over 7 years old. It will be 8 years old when Win 10 lapses into unsupported status next fall.
Why do you expect it to be current and supported past Q4 2025?

BTW you might be able to buy a TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, or you can set a reg value and bypass the TPM requirement and not use those features that depend on it.
 
Tangent:

I disagree. While your PC is still usable, it is not midrange any more. It does suck that MS will not be allowing you to continue on to Windows 11.

But the cutoff for Intel chips that have built-in TPM 2.0 is the 8000 series.

So you have 7000 series or older. The 7700k was released in Q1 2017.

Your PC is over 7 years old. It will be 8 years old when Win 10 lapses into unsupported status next fall.
Why do you expect it to be current and supported past Q4 2025?

BTW you might be able to buy a TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, or you can set a reg value and bypass the TPM requirement and not use those features that depend on it.
My PC is actually 10 years old. But the i7 5960X is still a beast, especially overclocked to 4 GHz, easily able to feed my 3080ti in 4k resolution in most games. Benchmarks still place the machine well above average, and the machine runs smoothly. There is no actual reason to replace it yet, besides Microsoft cutting it off. The easy solution would be to put Windows 10 into maintenance mode, no new features, but still security updates for maybe another 3-5 years. Which they are actually doing, but you have to pay for it. I might buy the first year, it's relatively cheap, but I'm also pretty confident that there will be unofficial update packs. There are still roughly twice as many Windows 10 in service than Windows 11, and Windows as a whole is losing market share vs alternatives, primarily Linux.
 
That needs updating...

... it needs "UE5, why not in ED?" added somewhere. (along with DLSS etc.)
I'll say it again: fdev being at the forefront (as they've shown to be before believe it or not =), would mean they are waiting for vulkan and AFSR to mature.
-with the work done by khronos group so far it is easy to see how close it is. (they just did a driver for apple hardware; a first in history)

Vulkan/AFSR are not only GPU-agnostic, but also OS-agnostic, and something seriously rare in the world of software: ridiculously easy to implement.
Vulkan is a scalpel where dx12 is a shovel; as close to literally as the words permit. -adding RT to elite is a bad idea atm; dx12(13) is not done.


Completely ironically, i could run Odyssey really fine from release on a 11 yr old mobo/cpu with 32Gb ram and an rt5500xt 8Gb.
-not at ultra, no. Didn't expect that either. High/1080p/60fps. The issues for me started once they started optimizing it. XD
Runs really well now and i can even do some of the older xml tweaks i used to do in 3.8. (no FSR; using CAS@80%)

_
Skyrim at least has mods like ENB that's doing these things ingame (kind of)
ENB is a custom 3dmigoto which is what EDHM uses, so the option of chasing/grading shaders is already there.
(edit: i'm not 100% that EDHM still use it; it did use to run off 3dmigoto in 3.8)
_
 
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I'll say it again: fdev being at the forefront (as they've shown to be before believe it or not =), would mean they are waiting for vulkan and AFSR to mature.
-with the work done by khronos group so far it is easy to see how close it is. (they just did a driver for apple hardware; a first in history)

How many years till it "matures" and gets implemented? If it's 1+ years that's a long time. Upgrading to DirectX 12 has lots of benefits such as:
  1. Ray tracing
  2. Mesh shading
  3. Variable rate shading
  4. Sampler Feedback
  5. Volume Tiled Resources
  6. Conservative Raster
  7. Raster Order Views
  8. Tiled Resources
  9. Typed UAV Access
  10. Bindless Textures
  11. Asynchronous Compute
  12. Global illumination, reflections and shadows
 
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How many years till it "matures" and gets implemented? If it's 1+ years that's a long time. Upgrading to DirectX 12 has lots of benefits such as:
  1. Ray tracing
  2. Mesh shading
  3. Variable rate shading
  4. Sampler Feedback
  5. Volume Tiled Resources
  6. Conservative Raster
  7. Raster Order Views
  8. Tiled Resources
  9. Typed UAV Access
  10. Bindless Textures
  11. Asynchronous Compute
  12. Global illumination, reflections and shadows
Yes and vulkan does those better if implemented. (there's an indepth article about their respective API calls)
Raytracing is not on the table when there are still performance issues, goes without saying.
"Upgrading to dx12" is not something you "just do"; the global light won't work when elite uses PBR.


Currently they are working on powerplay2, two more ships and the new feature.
-once that is done it is up to fdev what they want to do next.

Btw fun fact when dx12 came out it was 5-12% performance gain whereas vulkan was 10-25% performance gain.
Due to dx12 now being dx13 in everything but name, the performance has dropped even more unfortunately.

Case in point there is no performance gain to be had by upgrading to dx12; with vulkan there is.
-there is a reason steam uses vulkan shader caching.

Like i said vulkan is enough to make drivers for apple, so yea it's already ready. =)
(reason i talked about fdev waiting is because it is not needed now )


On top of that dx/dlss are neither open source nor GPU/OS agnostic, which limits usecases and accessibility even further.

_
 
Rather than adding new fancy graphical feature, it would be better if they enhanced and fixed existing graphical features that are currently lacking.

Odyssey looks a lot better than Legacy in many regards (the most prominent example that comes to mind are asteroids in rings, especially the icy ones, which look gorgeous in Odyssey and significantly blander and more boring in Legacy), but there are also many things that were implemented better in Legacy, such as planets being more affected by the color of the star illuminating them, the dark side of planets being much (and more realistically) darker, etc. (And, of course, they should finally fix the shadows that they broke a few updates back. They worked just fine before, and then they broke them and haven't been able to fix them for some reason.)
 
Tangent:

I disagree. While your PC is still usable, it is not midrange any more. It does suck that MS will not be allowing you to continue on to Windows 11.

But the cutoff for Intel chips that have built-in TPM 2.0 is the 8000 series.

So you have 7000 series or older. The 7700k was released in Q1 2017.

Your PC is over 7 years old. It will be 8 years old when Win 10 lapses into unsupported status next fall.
Why do you expect it to be current and supported past Q4 2025?

BTW you might be able to buy a TPM 2.0 module for your motherboard, or you can set a reg value and bypass the TPM requirement and not use those features that depend on it.
The i7-7700K does have a TPM 2.0 module built in. That's not the thing blocking the Win 11 upgrade, so buying another TPM 2.0 module is just a waste of money.

Everything on my system has a green checkmark for the upgrade, it's really just Microsofts decision to mark CPUs that meet all the requirements as "can't do" that makes my (and the systems of other users) unable to upgrade.
But: This doesn't make those systems garbage. They can still run Win 10 (although it will become more and more vulnerable over time) and it can run many other operating systems - you're not chained to Windows.
 
OH nice! It has been likely a decade since I checked up on this kind of info, so I'm woefully out of date, but yes still not quite up to the ability of the humans eye, and is something that you do still need to be aware of.

Now, the dark side of the moon, compared to staring at the sun, is about ... Well I've no idea how many F stops, let me ask a Chatty bot to see what they say ... Well Chatty GPT reckons that there are 26.6 F-stops between the dark side of the moon and direct sunlight :)
Human eye is about 14 stops. SDR display is about 8 stops. (Yeah, 8 bits is 8 stops... guess why.)

So you need to do something dynamic, or use tone mapping, or both, to cater for that gap of 6 stops even on conventionally lit pictures with diffuse lighting and naturalistic scenes.

The terminator on an icy moon? Yeah, it will look weird on your 8-stop display when you're trying to render 20 stops of range.

(HDR won't save you, it only adds two more stops...)
 
Raytracing is not on the table when there are still performance issues, goes without saying.

ED's graphics are 1 generation behind current-gen games due to a lack of ray-tracing, path-tracing, good anti-aliasing and so on. This isn't noticeable while flying a ship in the darkness of space, but it is obvious on-foot in the Concourse and on planets. The main purpose of a DX12 upgrade is to enable new graphics tech which give ED's wrinkly last gen visuals an overdue facelift. DX12 would increase performance with upscaling. The optional raytracing and path tracing would have playable framerates on high end PCs.

"Upgrading to dx12" is not something you "just do"; the global light won't work when elite uses PBR.

ED is still pretty except the jagged edges, LOD popups, flat ground textures, rasterization, a single light source limitation etc which make the graphics noticeably dated. Upgrading to DX12 isn't easy but it adds enough benefits for current-gen standards. This is useful for more immersive planet simulation such as Earth-like worlds.

Btw fun fact when dx12 came out it was 5-12% performance gain whereas vulkan was 10-25% performance gain.
Due to dx12 now being dx13 in everything but name, the performance has dropped even more unfortunately.

Case in point there is no performance gain to be had by upgrading to dx12; with vulkan there is.
-there is a reason steam uses vulkan shader caching.

I have a high-end PC and ED runs without any performance issues. The ultra graphics settings look dated by Today's standards. ED needs new visual bells and whistles that are possible with DX12.
 
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It's worse when you have a PC that is still well above middleclass by today's standards that's just being made obsolete by force next year, like mine.
What annoys me more is that all the security requirements are for nothing since they have all been compromised. That and trying to force weird AI backups on us, AI helpers I'll never use, and forcing me (eventually since workarounds are being locked out) to make an MS account.
 
Has that still not been fixed?
I returned to the game earlier this year, nearly had a seizure on a flickering shadow planet.
Switched off and thought, I’ll just wait until this is fixed, as planetary exploration will not be enjoyable.
It is baffling. Fixing this should be a priority, as it makes the game look terrible most of the time, yet shadows are still broken. Probably in a botched attempt to optimise the game performance.

There's hope Type8 update next week will bring some fixes in that regard. But I just realized I'm actually rather pessimistic about it. They do not have good record on fixing long standing bugs.
 
I'm a little relieved to learn that the flicking is not due to my hardware, thought that it was at first, which means that there is hope for resolution. I'm wondering if it is not caused by the thermal shimmer that you get from light sources.

Not sure what the correct term for that is, let my ask my chatty bot friend, they recon that it is 'Heat Haze'.
 
Sorry to hear of you chagrin, windows folks, that does really suck sadly the last teat of the graphics hardware gods. All the UI updates have been javascript skins too, man it is such a face palm moment for computing right now.

I'm on Mac for the first time in my life at the moment, after a stint on linux, never thought I'd see the day.
 
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