Graphics settings - Beyond Ultra

[Arthur Z.]

What is your VRAM and RAM? 8192 is an overkill for 2k probably, you are at ~3k so it is so & so but for 4k I think it is spot on. The thing is you must have at least 8gigs of VRAM and 16gigs of RAM to be able to handle this at 4K. I play at 5760x1080 tripple monitor so essentially I am at ~3K and use 1080Ti with 11gigs of VRAM and 16gis DDR4 RAM 2,66GHz. Yes it stutters during hyperspace but it is not that bad.
Morbad did say in a previous post that these edits are for High End systems.

I run GTX 1080 with 8GB of VRAM and I have 32GB of RAM. Hiccups in Hyperspace are caused by Galaxy Background generation (which is a CPU task most likely) since it's generated proceduraly for each star system.

Anyway, settings should be incrementally tested and compared step by step. For example I saw almost no change by increasing planet texture size (at least on earthlike planet), maybe it does improve planet quality in other places.

 

[Morbad]

I play at 1440p not 4k, but 8192 GalaxyBackground is 100% an overkill and will cause huge freezes, hiccups, increased loading times while in hyperspace! Please be a bit more metodical in your testing.

In thousands of hours of using 4-8k textures, I've not had any related issues other than what I mention near the beginning of the thread, which had a work around in earlier versions and was largely fixed in 3.3.

I find anything above 3512 for 1440p is going into placebo territory (and I've tested a lot by increasing the value bit by bit, re-launching the game, taking screenshots and comparing them in Photoshop).

I can clearly see the difference between 4k and 8k galaxy background on a 1440p+ display, in-game. All I need to do is look at a feature like the Pinwheel Galaxy or some of the nebulae.

5) Increase the value (in 256 increments or even less)

This is completely pointless. There is going to be diminishing returns as resolution rises and tiny increments are both a waste of time and performance (in my testing, I've always had best quality vs. performance results with power of two textures).

 

[hems303]

So, I picked up a new GeForce 2070. It runs Elite on my PC (i5 4670 3.4GHz / 16GB RAM) at a solid 60FPS at 4k and Ultra settings.

I love it.

Hi CMDR Corlas, So, I picked up a new GeForce RTX 2080. It runs Elite on my PC (i7 9700 4.2GHz / 32GB RAM) at a solid 105+/- FPS at 4k and Ultra settings. .... and I too love it!!!!

lol o7 (p.s. Lets not start a hardware arms race...hmm?) ..... good point about those mythical uber-ultra settings tho Rep+1

 

[ebbrell]

1080ti should be able to do similar to 2080 in elite at 1440p. I suppose the 2080 will enjoy the 4k, 1080ti wont

Do we know which setting to change now, the XML just doubled in size

 

[Morbad]

These are pretty typical hyperspace load times for me with 8k galaxy background, 8k planet textures, 1k environment maps, and 4k shadow slice sizes:

[video=youtube;rdj3ndEmAk0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdj3ndEmAk0[/video]

You can watch in 1080p to see things, including the FPS counter, more clearly. Game was run at 5120*2880 (4.00x DSR on a 32" 1440p display) with 0.65 in game SS (3328*1872 internal render resolution, so I can maintain ~100 fps while fighting in ice rings and over 60fps while recording with OBS in worst case scenario surface content), all ultra settings, except for disabled DoF, and my custom xml. 16x AF, high quality texture filtering, and single frame render ahead were forced in the NVIDIA drivers. System used was an i7-5820K @ 4.2GHz, 16GiB of DDR4-2667 CL12, and a non-reference GTX 1080 Ti 11GiB at 2025MHz core, 5940MT/s GDDR5X.

That was recorded less than 30 minutes before this post (with a phone, so OBS wouldn't obfuscate any stuttering that may have been), just after I started the game, making a pair of hyperspace jumps through systems I hadn't been through that system restart, so no background assets were preloaded.

The time it takes is within a second per jump of the vanilla ultra preset (2k galaxy background texture) and the only hiccups I saw were momentary dips into the 70s FPS. By and large, my test systems have no issues with 8k textures and, ship permitting, I can knock out ~40 second jump-to-jump times like clockwork, with minimal hitching.

GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml I was using is the one posted a few posts above this.

Do we know which setting to change now, the XML just doubled in size

Which setting to do what?

 

[n4p0l3on]

Possibly excessive texture/shadow resolution for your card's VRAM, or insufficient system memory.

What are your system specs and what other settings are you trying to use?

I think it's more than enough, I'm using an i7 4930k, 16gb ram and an rtx 2070.

only tried your config, to complement the default utra settings.

 

[Morbad]

I think it's more than enough, I'm using an i7 4930k, 16gb ram and an rtx 2070.

only tried your config, to complement the default utra settings.

You could try reducing the galaxy background texture, and perhaps the planet surface texture, resolution to 4k. Just open the file in a text editor and replace every instance of '8192' with '4096'.

If that helps, it was likely a VRAM limitation.

 

[n4p0l3on]

You could try reducing the galaxy background texture, and perhaps the planet surface texture, resolution to 4k. Just open the file in a text editor and replace every instance of '8192' with '4096'.

If that helps, it was likely a VRAM limitation.

yep, it seem to do the trick, so now we know that 8 GB VRAM isn't enough for your tweak at 3440x1440 res.

 

[Morbad]

yep, it seem to do the trick, so now we know that 8 GB VRAM isn't enough for your tweak at 3440x1440 res.

Definitely good to know. I'll probably separate the adjustments into 'high' and 'higher' VRAM categories.

Thanks for the feedback.

Edit: If you'd be willing to test another change, could you see what happens when you restore the 8k textures, but set the "texturepoolbudget" to '90'?

 

[Bunkerkind Anni]

thansk morbad for that override file
i dont play on ultra settings, but it makes the HUD much better readable again.

 

[Morbad]

thansk morbad for that override file
i dont play on ultra settings, but it makes the HUD much better readable again.

What quality setting do you normally use for bloom? I ask because the lower qualities use a different filter that can benefit from other options, if the main goal is to improve HUD legibility and tone down some of the lighting brightness.

 

[n4p0l3on]

Definitely good to know. I'll probably separate the adjustments into 'high' and 'higher' VRAM categories.

Thanks for the feedback.

Edit: If you'd be willing to test another change, could you see what happens when you restore the 8k textures, but set the "texturepoolbudget" to '90'?

I can't promise you that.

 

[Arthur Z.]

...I can clearly see the difference between 4k and 8k galaxy background on a 1440p+ display, in-game. All I need to do is look at a feature like the Pinwheel Galaxy or some of the nebulae...

But will you see the difference between 5k and 8k textures? Or maybe 6k and 8k? All I am saying is that going straight from 4k to 8k may be inefficient since you most likely will stop getting any benefit before 8k.

 

[ShadowWolf Kell]

But will you see the difference between 5k and 8k textures? Or maybe 6k and 8k? All I am saying is that going straight from 4k to 8k may be inefficient since you most likely will stop getting any benefit before 8k.

Absolutely. The difference between 4k and 8k, is like 512 and 2k. Go check out Earth at 4k and 8k and see for yourself.

This was done with planets at 8k.

As was this one.

This was at 4k.

 

[Good Death]

I can't prove it but I will say that the 8k galaxy background has definitely improved my VR experience.

 

[Morbad]

But will you see the difference between 5k and 8k textures? Or maybe 6k and 8k? All I am saying is that going straight from 4k to 8k may be inefficient since you most likely will stop getting any benefit before 8k.

Yes, I can see the difference between 6k (though 6k has some trade offs relative to 4k) and 8k. Benefits don't stop at 8k either as I can still see further improvement by going to 16k. However, 16k does start to produce issues, even with 11GiB of VRAM, and the quality improvement is not readily apparent unless I really look for it, so 8k is where I stopped. I didn't bother testing 32k textures (the max most modern hardware will support).

Most people are probably fine with stock and most people will have difficulty distinguishing between 4k and 8k on most displays. I'd still recommend sticking to those power-of-two texture sizes, even though arbitrary texture dimensions are supported, because there are still potential side-effects to NPOT textures, and in my testing, intermediate settings may as well be the next lower (if VRAM is an issue) power-of-two, or the next higher one (if VRAM isn't). I'm sure there are cases where a NPOT is optimal, and the game even defaults to one for galaxy background on ultra, but they appear to be exceptions.

If you're stopping at 3512, have you tried 4096 to see if there is a noticeable improvement in clarity, or any reduction in performance on your setup? 8GiB of VRAM should be plenty for 4k textures.

I can't prove it but I will say that the 8k galaxy background has definitely improved my VR experience.

Apparent display size is a big part of it.

That galaxy background texture is for the entire sky and would need to be several times the display resolution before it could map 1:1 to most displays and even larger before clarity stopped improving.

I find higher background texture res very noticeable sitting three feet from this 32" 1440p display or six feet from my 55" 4k TV. Despite the lower resolution, it's even more apparent in VR (my new HMD is 2880*1440) because the display itself fills that much more of my view, making features appear more magnified.

 

[Arthur Z.]

Absolutely. The difference between 4k and 8k, is like 512 and 2k. Go check out Earth at 4k and 8k and see for yourself.
This was done with planets at 8k.
As was this one.
This was at 4k.

You can't take screenshots of different things and compare the quality. I've just went and took these screenshots. One of them is 3280 planet texture size, the other is 8192, please tell me which one is which (as a side note, I've found only a couple of pixels different in photoshop):

Spoiler

Spoiler

Just to make sure, my overrides were working I've took a screenshot with 1280 planet TextureSize:

Spoiler

So I can't believe you can see the difference between 8k and 16k because there is no difference at all between 3280 and 8192 (but that's at my 1440p resolution) unless you're taking High res screenshots or something.

 

[nanite2000]

You can't take screenshots of different things and compare the quality. I've just went and took these screenshots. One of them is 3280 planet texture size, the other is 8192, please tell me which one is which

None of your photos are showing in your post, so comparison is difficult.

 

[Nick Sticks]

You can't take screenshots of different things and compare the quality. I've just went and took these screenshots. One of them is 3280 planet texture size, the other is 8192, please tell me which one is which (as a side note, I've found only a couple of pixels different in photoshop):

As said above, the pictures aren't viewable.
I think it's a permissions thing, you probably need to make them public.
Failing that use Imgur for posting and linking images.

 

[Arthur Z.]

As said above, the pictures aren't viewable.
I think it's a permissions thing, you probably need to make them public.
Failing that use Imgur for posting and linking images.

Yep, sorry about that. Moved images to dropbox, should be now viewable. BTW even when taking High res screenshots (with Alt+F10), there is absolutely no difference between 3280 and 8192.