Graphics settings - Beyond Ultra

[CMDR Corlas]

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.

I've heard tale of secret graphics settings, via editing ini files or some much, that'll push beyond Ultra. Where should I start tweaking?

 

[Cosmo]

You can try this see if it works:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/264270-Graphic-Tweaks-Dreamscape-Feeling-amp-alii .

and this for planet textures (change it to 4096 or 8192):

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/129065-Higher-Resolution512-Planet-textures

 

[Patrick_68000]

Be careful not to destroy the card.

 

[Nick Sticks]

This sort of thing needs care and testing by a qualified person.

Lend it to me for while and I'll sort it for you.

 

[Wasp0]

This sort of thing needs care and testing by a qualified person.

Lend it to me for while and I'll sort it for you.

Thats a very kind gesture from a community member, If ok with you and along the lines of your great gesture, give me your address and I'll send you my GTX 210 to sort out for me to run in this extra Ultra settings.

Thanks in anticipation....

Spoiler

[/IMG]

 

[777Driver]

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.

I've heard tale of secret graphics settings, via editing ini files or some much, that'll push beyond Ultra. Where should I start tweaking?

I keep it simple and use Dr Kaii's app. Personally use it for VR but I'm sure it is fine for normal screens. Crank it all up With a 1080TI in VR everything is butter smooth with things above ultra, so I 2070 should be fine. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...er-Robust-Settings-Profiler-Switcher-Detector!

 

[Morbad]

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.

I've heard tale of secret graphics settings, via editing ini files or some much, that'll push beyond Ultra. Where should I start tweaking?

I've made a few threads on the topic in the past namely:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...vs-IQ-in-Elite-Dangerous-on-higher-end-setups

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-Dangerous-display-quality-settings-continued

Some of that is now depreciated, namely the shadow settings, which were mostly fixed some time before 3.2. Stuff relating to planet, galaxy background, and environment map texture is still applicable though.

If you want to keep things simple you can paste this into your "GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml" file (normally located in %AppData%\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics\):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<GraphicsConfig>
	<Planets>
		<Ultra>
			<TextureSize>4096</TextureSize>
			<WorkPerFrame>512</WorkPerFrame>
		</Ultra>
	</Planets>
	<GalaxyBackground>
		<High>
			<TextureSize>4096</TextureSize>
		</High>
	</GalaxyBackground>
	<Envmap>
		<High>
			<TextureSize>1024</TextureSize>
			<NumMips>10</NumMips>
		</High>
	</Envmap>
</GraphicsConfig>

Note that I highly recommend against using texture resolutions past 4096 as you will get progressively more noticeable texture pop-in around complex areas like starports, irrespective of how much video memory you have. You can use 8192 or even 16384 for screen shots of planets, but I don't consider them suitable for general play.

 

[777Driver]

Note that I highly recommend against using texture resolutions past 4096 as you will get progressively more noticeable texture pop-in around complex areas like starports, irrespective of how much video memory you have. You can use 8192 or even 16384 for screen shots of planets, but I don't consider them suitable for general play.

Are you running a 1080TI? Never seen that happen on my rig, OP should be fine on 2070

 

[Morbad]

Are you running a 1080TI?

I normally play the game with a 1080 Ti, yes.

Never seen that happen on my rig, OP should be fine on 2070

I've never seen it not happen on any system I've used the game on in the last four years.

Past a certain combination of display resolution and texture size, some textures are delayed in loading, or even fail to load entirely if things are too far. At 4k res and 4k textures I can see a slight delay on the texture loading of the entrance slot when looking at it from the inside of a starport and pushing texture resolutions higher results in progressively greater issues.

 

[Pville_Piper]

An RTX 2070 is the same as a GTX 1080, maybe a little faster.

 

[777Driver]

I normally play the game with a 1080 Ti, yes.



I've never seen it not happen on any system I've used the game on in the last four years.

Past a certain combination of display resolution and texture size, some textures are delayed in loading, or even fail to load entirely if things are too far. At 4k res and 4k textures I can see a slight delay on the texture loading of the entrance slot when looking at it from the inside of a starport and pushing texture resolutions higher results in progressively greater issues.

Never seen it on my system. Running 32gig ram, 1080TI overclocked, I7 7700K at 5.1 ghz combined with a bunch or system tweaks. Should be the GPU and System ram doing all the work. Been running at 8192 for a very long time now, back way before Obsidian posted his guide.

If you don't mind, could you PM your graphics XML to me, would like to compare. Perhaps my settings are not actually applied properly, although I can definitely tell planets and galaxy background are higher res then default

Thanks

 

[andrak]

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.

I've heard tale of secret graphics settings, via editing ini files or some much, that'll push beyond Ultra. Where should I start tweaking?

I wouldn't change too much in the ini files. You will be RMA-ing that card pretty soon, unless you like to play space invaders permanently in all other games.

 

[777Driver]

I wouldn't change too much in the ini files.

I'd say the majority of 1080 and higher users are running modded graphic xml files. No reason not to, plenty of overhead to go above the defaults. OP is running a beast of a card.

 

[Morbad]

Should be the GPU and System ram doing all the work.

Doesn't matter what's doing the work, the game it self seems to be the limiting factor in this regard. I suspect it's too aggressive at evicting assets and isn't making proper use of the memory it's got available.

If you don't mind, could you PM your graphics XML to me, would like to compare.

I put my changes in the override, with the relevant ones already posted. My GraphicsConfiguration.xml in the game directory is unaltered. I've done it both ways and both ways function the same, but the override persists through updates and is easier to manage.

Been running at 8192 for a very long time now, back way before Obsidian posted his guide.

I'll see if I can get a video of the issues I've been having with 8192.

 

[777Driver]

I'll see if I can get a video of the issues I've been having with 8192.

Cheers mate! Off to watch the stream

 

[Morbad]

Alright, I tried to reproduce the issue and could not in the current live build of the game.

Puzzled, I went through some archival videos I had and found the most recent one where I could see signs of the issue (at 4k, which always had minor and tolerable texture problems). Watch the area around the letter box as my ship is coming out of the hangar (may need to view fullscreen at one of the higher resolutions for it to be clear):

[video=youtube;K4qszDmkDU4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4qszDmkDU4[/video]

Notice the single texture that is extremely slow in loading? LOD issues like that used to happen at that specific part and very rarely on some surface bases or on ship models in outfitting, at 4k textures. 8k was much worse, to the point that many textures never fully loaded and ended up looking like mud.

Either they fixed this some time in 3.x, or the fixes they made to shadows around the same time indirectly fixed the issue for me, as I was able to stop using my custom shadow settings (which doubled shadow slice/map size and added more frustums to improve shadow quality). The only other thing I can think of that might explain the difference is that I switched to using 1.99999 for LOD distance scale about six months back; it's possible this forces otherwise low priority textures to load further out, but that couldn't explain why you don't see the issue (unless you've also increased the LOD distance scale).

Anyway, I haven't seen the problem recently, but didn't attempt 8k texture resolution again until just now, and everything seems to work.

Conversion to jpeg ate some quality, but these should still suffice (they are 3840*2160 res, might need to view them full screen, zoomed in):

Thanks for inspiring me to test things again.

 

[nexxo]

Thats a very kind gesture from a community member, If ok with you and along the lines of your great gesture, give me your address and I'll send you my GTX 210 to sort out for me to run in this extra Ultra settings.

Thanks in anticipation....

Nailed it:

 

[Morbad]

Turned up my shadow slice and environment map sizes further, and the issue with 8k textures reappears:

[video=youtube;TJEWibL32lE]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJEWibL32lE[/video]

Doing some trial and error testing to see what combinations cause this.

 

[777Driver]

Turned up my shadow slice and environment map sizes further, and the issue with 8k textures reappears:



Doing some trial and error testing to see what combinations cause this.

Hey buddy, can you PM that XML (no rush) See I've never messed with shadow settings etc, only upped the Planet, Galaxy and few other texture settings. Never messed with shadows or other stuff beyond the in the ingame UI settings. Maybe that's why I never saw your issue.

do you think it would be an improvement to reduce down to 4096 and crank some of the other settings you describe? For example, how big is the difference between in game Ultra shadows and what you are using?

 

[Morbad]

Hey buddy, can you PM that XML (no rush) See I've never messed with shadow settings etc, only upped the Planet, Galaxy and few other texture settings. Never messed with shadows or other stuff beyond the in the ingame UI settings. Maybe that's why I never saw your issue.

I attached the xml I was using in the video above to this post. You can just replace the automatically generated GraphicsConfigurationOverride.xml (which is empty by default) that's located in "%AppData%\Local\Frontier Developments\Elite Dangerous\Options\Graphics" with it.

Shadow maps/slices are quite memory heavy because of how many frustums there are and with the slice size at 4k it seems to be overloading some arbitrary texture buffer or budget in the game/engine somewhere, when combined with sufficient texture and render resolution elsewhere.

do you think it would be an improvement to reduce down to 4096 and crank some of the other settings you describe? For example, how big is the difference between in game Ultra shadows and what you are using?

In the past I found the higher shadow slice size to be somewhat more of a noticeable improvement than going to 4k textures, but I was combining it with extra frustums and tweaked depth bias to fix other problems that no longer exist, so I've got to test the differences again to see if I feel it's worth it.

Right now the only change to shadows I've made is the slice size (as you can see in the xml) which does clean up shadow edges noticeably in some cases, but I'm on the fence if it's worth dropping down to 4k planet and galaxy background textures.

Going to experiment with some non-power-of-two shadow slices and see if I can get any benefit.

Edit: removed outdated attachment.