Ground/settlement/conflict zones FPS fix (maybe)

Kaminotate · Jul 3, 2022

So took me a while to come up with this, but i've had dealings with other games that run bad (looking at you bethesda).
I run a pretty crappy pc, most parts are from 2018/2019 and when i got odyssey, it ran at 15fps in ground conflict zones, unplayable.

Took me well over a week to find a fix. Now, im not saying this will work for everyone, but it works for everyone that tried it until now.

1st: Terrain work slider, set that to 50% for a start (you may need to play with it a bit,depending on the gpu u have and how much can it handle to find the sweet spot)
2nd: Volumetric effects, set them to low.

Restart the game and try it out.

The thing is, when the slider is set to 0, the cpu is rendering the terrain and since some or all of its cores are already used by your OS,anything running in the background,the game it just doesn't have the compute power to handle the terrain in real time, especially when u are moving around and well, the game is trying to render more. Thats why you see low gpu usage on the ground, in my case 50-60%. Bottleneck. So by putting that work to the gpu which will be more or less at 100% after, there is barely any bottleneck. This is where playing with the slider comes into play, If you want a stable high fps, you will need to find on what postition it works best.

p.s. the flickering on edges,surfaces and stuff like that. If you arent afraid of a few jagged edges, set antialiasing to FXAA. Clears most of them.

Condor · Jul 3, 2022

What are PC specs?
And why do you think that the slider transferrs the task to render terrain performed by CPU to GPU? Won't it just add some details instead?
As for flickering, it is a pain in the ass in EDO. It may be somewhat reduced by setting of supersampling of at least 1.25, but it hitts the performance quite significantly

Kaminotate · Jul 3, 2022

Condor said:
What are PC specs?
And why do you think that the slider transferrs the task to render terrain performed by CPU to GPU? Won't it just add some details instead?
As for flickering, it is a pain in the in EDO. It may be somewhat reduced by setting of supersampling of at least 1.25, but it hitts the performance quite significantly

"Increases or decreases the amount of work the graphics card does to generate terrain" -ingame description

Specs are:
R5 2600
16GB
RX580
Game is on an ssd

[VR] Bulbulunufus · Jul 3, 2022

Kaminotate said:
So took me a while to come up with this, but i've had dealings with other games that run bad (looking at you bethesda).
I run a pretty crappy pc, most parts are from 2018/2019 and when i got odyssey, it ran at 15fps in ground conflict zones, unplayable.

Took me well over a week to find a fix. Now, im not saying this will work for everyone, but it works for everyone that tried it until now.

1st: Terrain work slider, set that to 50% for a start (you may need to play with it a bit,depending on the gpu u have and how much can it handle to find the sweet spot)
2nd: Volumetric effects, set them to low.

Restart the game and try it out.

The thing is, when the slider is set to 0, the cpu is rendering the terrain and since some or all of its cores are already used by your OS,anything running in the background,the game it just doesn't have the compute power to handle the terrain in real time, especially when u are moving around and well, the game is trying to render more. Thats why you see low gpu usage on the ground, in my case 50-60%. Bottleneck. So by putting that work to the gpu which will be more or less at 100% after, there is barely any bottleneck. This is where playing with the slider comes into play, If you want a stable high fps, you will need to find on what postition it works best.

p.s. the flickering on edges,surfaces and stuff like that. If you arent afraid of a few jagged edges, set antialiasing to FXAA. Clears most of them.

So are you saying that the other forms of antialiasing available (I normally use SMAA) cause the flickering or are you assuming people aren't already using antialiasing?

Kaminotate · Jul 3, 2022

Yes,all antialiasing causes the flickering in ED, but FXAA causes the least.

I mean, why not just try it?

aquilla · Jul 3, 2022

the flickering is caused by a glitch in the mip mapping of textures , the terrain flickering is caused by an error in their shader code that causes values greater than 1.0 making dead spots that are about 1 to 2 pixels wide and the mip mapping issue , if you look closely you'll see them every so often , places on the terrain with lines down them.

I'll give this a shot but I think that slider is just to say how much work the game does at once on the GPU , either way the gpu is doing work , there is no switching between GPU and CPU to do the same work , syncing that alone would be a nightmare but I could be wrong .

[VR] Bulbulunufus · Jul 4, 2022

Kaminotate said:
Yes,all antialiasing causes the flickering in ED, but FXAA causes the least.

I mean, why not just try it?

Why would I not try it? Hope you didn't mind me clarifying what you mean so I can verify it when I get the chance.

Morbad · Jul 5, 2022

The terrain work slider isn't setting a CPU vs. GPU balance...all the terrain referenced here is generated via compute shaders running on the GPU regardless of the setting. The setting is more of a priority adjustment, as the internal designation for the setting ("GpuSchedulerMultiplier") hints at.

Jack Winter · Jul 5, 2022

FWIW, my old system seems often CPU limited (i7-2600K with a 1660Ti). I moved the terrain work slider all the way to the right and set the quality to the highest setting). Didn't seem to impact the performance at all, but the loading of terrain detail is a lot better when approaching a planetary surface.

CaptainPugwash · Jul 5, 2022

Jack Winter said:
FWIW, my old system seems often CPU limited (i7-2600K with a 1660Ti). I moved the terrain work slider all the way to the right and set the quality to the highest setting). Didn't seem to impact the performance at all, but the loading of terrain detail is a lot better when approaching a planetary surface.

My i7 4790k often gets bottlenecked, so I also find that my GPU (GTX 1080) is able to handle fairly high settings in general with that slider all the way to the right as long as I use Ultra quality FSR (I have a 1440p monitor) and still maintain around 50 fps in settlements. So it does seem sometimes that increasing graphics settings 'has no effect' on FPS, when it's probably using the GPU dead time.
It also seems that once the CPU has it's load lightened (at the expense of the GPU), there are less stuttering issues, but maybe that is my subjective impression.

Jack Winter · Jul 5, 2022

My observation on WINE/Linux is that the more loaded the CPU is (from other programs), the worse ED performs. But I don't want to suggest that this is the general case, maybe it works fine on Windows. Who knows, maybe it's not only a question of threads being starved of CPU time, and limited memory bandwidth, but also a question of the CPU cache being trashed. I suppose that there is some utility to examine how well the CPU cache is working, but I'm too lazy to dig one out. I mean, it's not like knowing is going to change anything for me. Only software updates or better hardware can..

I did some playing around with the priority of threads making sure that ED's were executed before any other and noticed no difference in performance, which might indicate that ED is limited by one thread maxing out my CPU.

On the positive side I do use 1.25X super sampling and it also doesn't seem to have any (at least bigger) impact on the performance.

And don't let it swap, at least on Linux as that hits the performance too.

Morbad · Jul 5, 2022

Jack Winter said:
Who knows, maybe it's not only a question of threads being starved of CPU time, and limited memory bandwidth, but also a question of the CPU cache being trashed.

Unless the CPU cores themselves are very slow and the memory subsystem very fast, anything that causes increased cache contention or competes for memory access will hurt EDO performance in non-GPU limited scenarios.

Jack Winter said:
I did some playing around with the priority of threads making sure that ED's were executed before any other and noticed no difference in performance, which might indicate that ED is limited by one thread maxing out my CPU.

Either a single thread maxing out a core, or just waiting on memory.

Ceres_O7 · Jul 5, 2022

GTX 1070 and i5 6600 here -

My performance notably improved when I dropped texture filtering down to trilinear and texture quality down to medium. Also spot shadows down to medium. Visually, the only difference is some signs get blurred more when viewed at an angle. There seems to be no noticeable difference in texture quality or shadows, but now when at small settlements I get smooth 60fps (45-50fps during CZ) and maybe 30 on a large settlement CZ. Pretty much every other part of the game always 60 except for starport concourses at 45.