[GUIDE] How to Improve Elite's Graphics with Mods and Tweaks...

[raeat]

What are your system spec, maybe its because I just didn't noticed but I don't believe it's on my system, however will check later today.

Can anyone link to some pictures so I can see where to look for it?

It isn't something that can be shown in a single pic. It is fluctuating lines and is there regardless of refresh rate or resolution. I just checked those. I usually default to 30 FPS to mitigate heat, and 1920*1080 because I have poor eyesight (so I can read in-game text). Any straight line in a space dock, especially the glowing lines around the mail slot in a station. The grill around the outside of the mail slot is really bad for it too.

I am running Win10 on
Intel Core i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10 GHz.
32 Gb RAM
64 bit OS, x 64 based processor.
NVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti

Current anti-aliasing: SMAA. The others just wreck my computer's response times in game.

I recently installed SweetFX, but I'm going to have to ditch it. I need Pageup and Pagedown freed up for mouse button controls. (Yes, I use mouse+keyboard; don't hate me).
I'll try one of the other two, if I can get it.

 

[Alec Turner]

It isn't something that can be shown in a single pic. It is fluctuating lines and is there regardless of refresh rate or resolution. I just checked those. I usually default to 30 FPS to mitigate heat, and 1920*1080 because I have poor eyesight (so I can read in-game text). Any straight line in a space dock, especially the glowing lines around the mail slot in a station. The grill around the outside of the mail slot is really bad for it too.

I am running Win10 on
Intel Core i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10 GHz.
32 Gb RAM
64 bit OS, x 64 based processor.
NVidia GeForce GTX 750 Ti

Current anti-aliasing: SMAA. The others just wreck my computer's response times in game.

I recently installed SweetFX, but I'm going to have to ditch it. I need Pageup and Pagedown freed up for mouse button controls. (Yes, I use mouse+keyboard; don't hate me).
I'll try one of the other two, if I can get it.

This definitely sounds like an anti-aliasing problem. Unfortunately the in-game anti-aliasing options seem to be notoriously innefective at curing it. Have you tried turning supersampling up to 1.5x or even 2.0x. This will put an additional load on your PC which you can counter by turning anti-aliasing off and perhaps some of the other graphics settings down (I'm no expert but isn't Ambient Oclusion another big GPU hog?).

 

[raeat]

I tried turning supersampling up to 1.5 and to 2, but that was not happiness. Just changing menus was clunky and lengthy.

So much attention payed by FDev to graphics detail and specialized lighting effects and end up with anti-aliasing issues.

Ah well, it's not unplayable. Just have to take a visual break everyone so often. Thanks for the attempted assist.

 

[kalniel]

I tried turning supersampling up to 1.5 and to 2, but that was not happiness. Just changing menus was clunky and lengthy.

Yeah as mentioned, the performance hit is quite extreme.

So much attention payed by FDev to graphics detail and specialized lighting effects and end up with anti-aliasing issues.

It's not trivial, and whatever approach would compromise something else. Sadly it's one of the key reasons a smaller dev ends up taking a pre-written code package from a vendor like nVidia, which I really don't like very much if it results in vendor specific features.

Your 750ti unfortunately doesn't have much power to spare for these techniques, so absolutely forget about supersampling, and even mutli-sampling techniques will be too hard. I would recommend FXAA as probably the best bang for buck AA method that should run on your card - depending on your monitor's upscaling quality, I would even try running the game at HD resolution (720x1280?) and adding FXAA. It will look slightly blurrier, but text size will be larger.

 

[Alec Turner]

Not quite sure where to post this (I'll probably add it to my Good/Bad/Ugly post in the VR thread too) but one thing I've done which seems to help with shearing is to turn On vertical sync for edlauncher.exe in the NVIDIA 3D graphics settings rather than using the in-game vertical sync option. Anyway, following the recent purchase of the Oculus Rift, I've spotted that when I'm running ED on the monitor (rather than in VR), this is no longer working. It seems that, because launching ED automatically starts up Oculus Home, this somehow prevents NVIDIA from doing its vertical sync thing. However, if you stop the OVRService (which then prevents Oculus Home starting up and is described in the thread linked above), then the NVIDIA vertical-sync option works as normal.

 

[Pville_Piper]

I tried the sweetfx mod yesterday and couldn't get it too work for some reason and the graphics configuration thing didn't seem to do anything either. I was in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Elite Dangerous\Products\elite-dangerous-64 with the AA off. Are these not something that works any longer?

 

[Tin Actual]

Same problem. Finally tried Sweetfx and it didn't appear to be working. Dropped it into the correct folder, started ED, pressed page up/down, nothing.

Running ED: Horizons 64 bit
Installed Sweetfx to \steam\steamapps\common\Elite Dangerous\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1010
Win 10
intel i7 6700k
MSI Z170 Carbon Pro Gaming
EVGA GTX 980
ram
hard drives
stuff
things

 

[Pville_Piper]

Same problem. Finally tried Sweetfx and it didn't appear to be working. Dropped it into the correct folder, started ED, pressed page up/down, nothing.

Running ED: Horizons 64 bit
Installed Sweetfx to \steam\steamapps\common\Elite Dangerous\Products\FORC-FDEV-D-1010

I believe that is the folder for the vanilla version and Horizons is in elite-dangerous-64. I have it in both to no avail.

 

[Insomnia]

It's important that you guys use the 64bit version of SweetFX and that you use the correct binary and also rename it correctly. I'd still recommend using ReShade as it has all the SweetFX effects in it, as well as all GemFX, MasterEffect and various other effects included.

http://reshade.me/

 

[Tin Actual]

It's important that you guys use the 64bit version of SweetFX and that you use the correct binary and also rename it correctly. I'd still recommend using ReShade as it has all the SweetFX effects in it, as well as all GemFX, MasterEffect and various other effects included.

http://reshade.me/

I grabbed the 64 bit version and moved it into the folder as the readme said, but I didn't see anything about renaming files.

Sounds like I should just skip it and go for ReShade anyway.

 

[Insomnia]

Renaming is needed so the injector can hook into the game's .exe.
For Elite Dangerous, the hook is dxgi.dll.

 

[amaskedman]

Do you have reshade instructions? I tried reshade 3, and it asked for an executable, what does it want? I have horizons, and so I assume the new horizons executable in force-fdev-d-1010, correct?

Once thats done, then what? There is no program to run, nothing is even in add/remove programs.

 

[Insomnia]

Do you have reshade instructions? I tried reshade 3, and it asked for an executable, what does it want? I have horizons, and so I assume the new horizons executable in force-fdev-d-1010, correct?

Once thats done, then what? There is no program to run, nothing is even in add/remove programs.

It wants the ED executable: elitedangerous64.exe so the installation program can detect what API ED uses.

 

[Frankymole]

Can anyone please tell me how to uninstall (remove) EDFX? Or at the very least get rid of the text in the top-left of the Elite playing screen about "visit http : reshade.me etc or "No effect found" or whatever?

I have to remove EDFX because of frame-rate issues.

But there is no uninstall file, or instructions. The Readme.txt makes no mention of how to do it and searches have proved fruitless.

I have tried setting it to "close on game start up", and before that to uninstall FX files. Neither work. The shaders are still enabled every time I load Elite: Dangerous.

It didn't appear in add/remove programs either. I'm running Windows 8. It doesn't show up in windows program uninstall tool.

I deleted its folder and files. It still operates whenever I load Elite, as if it was all still there! I clicked the uninstall shader files button on the EDFX dialogue box / launcher whatever-it-is-called. That didn't work either.

Does anyone know how to remove it, or am I stuck with it forever?

 

[NW3]

What really gets to me is the "construction paper" effect of space games, particularly noticeable in the Elite Dangerous opening and main menu screens. It looks like a bunch of kids cut up some construction paper and overlapped them to "add depth." Sudden jarring changes in colour and texture.

As others have stated, this is called "banding" or "color bands". The reason you are see it at opening and the main menu is that those backgrounds are just short videos, not "real" 3D graphics. (It's obvious that they are videos in anaglyph 3D mode.)

Video compression often has these artifacts. To fix this, FD needs to re-encode those videos to use a higher bit rate.

This definitely sounds like an anti-aliasing problem. Unfortunately the in-game anti-aliasing options seem to be notoriously innefective at curing it. Have you tried turning supersampling up to 1.5x or even 2.0x. This will put an additional load on your PC which you can counter by turning anti-aliasing off and perhaps some of the other graphics settings down (I'm no expert but isn't Ambient Oclusion another big GPU hog?).

Unfortunately, even 2.0 supersampling doesn't fix the issue, it just makes it a little less noticeable. This is (in part) due to the lack of a rotated grid sampling pattern, which is standard for antialiasing, but not possible using a standard supersampling technique and requires support for pixel-sampling-offsets or rendering 4 (or more) frames and combining them. To make supersampling fix the aliasing issues you'd need 3x or 4x SS, at a cost of 9x or 16 times the number of pixels (3x or 4x squared, for x and y).

Theoretically, it is possible to get 4x SS (16x number of pixels) on NVidia hardware (2x SS in-game with an additional 2x in the driver (NVidia calls it 4x, which is the increase in number of pixels, not scaling factor). I tried that on my 4K monitor and got < 1 frame per second, and many of the textures were black, probably due to a lack of memory to render 16K resolution. I think you'd probably need something like 12-16GB of memory on the graphics card, for the buffers, textures, etc. to successfully do 4x SS on a 4K monitor. My graphics card only has 6GB, which is clearly insufficient.

 

[Kneejo]

Can anyone please tell me how to uninstall (remove) EDFX? Or at the very least get rid of the text in the top-left of the Elite playing screen about "visit http : reshade.me etc or "No effect found" or whatever?

I have to remove EDFX because of frame-rate issues.

Install it again, and then click on 'FX uninstall' from within the EDFX app

 

[LazyGorilla]

Hey all - new to Elite on the PC. I installed EDFX last night and all light sources have a glow or aura around them that really seem to reduce detail. For example suns look like a blurry mess with much less detail visible due to the glowing. Any idea how to tone that down?

 

[Good Death]

Warning to all! I have used my computer for two games only Elite dangerous and Fallout 4. I have heavily modded Fallout 4 and just recently attempted to tweak the graphics for elite dangerous with edfx and reshade. Last night I found wfo.exe a Trojan on my pc. I'm not pointing fingers here just thought I would give a heads up to the community. Be vigilant pay close attention. This exe was found in c: users ?????? Appdata Roaming. So if you've been toying around like myself you should have a look because somehow this got there without being detected by my antivirus software. Good luck o7 cmdrs.

I would also like to add that once this junk was removed from my computer any and all stuttering issues I had have been alleviated.

 

[Insomnia]

Warning to all! I have used my computer for two games only Elite dangerous and Fallout 4. I have heavily modded Fallout 4 and just recently attempted to tweak the graphics for elite dangerous with edfx and reshade. Last night I found wfo.exe a Trojan on my pc. I'm not pointing fingers here just thought I would give a heads up to the community. Be vigilant pay close attention. This exe was found in c: users ?????? Appdata Roaming. So if you've been toying around like myself you should have a look because somehow this got there without being detected by my antivirus software. Good luck o7 cmdrs.

I would also like to add that once this junk was removed from my computer any and all stuttering issues I had have been alleviated.

I know some of the ReShade devs and they have absolutely NO INTENTIONS of spreading Trojans. Some antivirus software do however believe injectors to be harmful. Always a good idea to be safe and if you're unsure about injectors in general, don't use it.
I've used injectors since 2010 and I have never had issues that weren't my fault to begin with.

But thanks for the heads up! Repped

 

[mp4x]

Hello CMDRs,

I've never installed EDFX/etc and I mostly play in VR. That's what I've a question about - Do any VR players use EDFX? Any problems?