Odyssey performance vs Horizons

[LordLocksley]

Greetings Commanders.

Up until now I've never bothered with Odyssey and its performance issues, as I'm a Horizons player and tbh I'm not interested at all on space legs.

But now I'm a bit concerned, as Horizons players are going to get the 4.0 Odyssey client (minus on foot sections) in the near future, and I'm assuming that all the new lore and community content are only going to be made for the 4.0 version, even if the 'old' 3.8 client will still be accessible for the time being. Much as has happened already with the Azimuth finale, where the current 3.8 version Horizons players only got the cinematic and that's it, (https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/gotta-love-this-supposed-update.606652/post-9909455)

So, a couple of questions here.

Anyone knows why the performance changed so much (for the worse), even on the "common" areas between Horizons and Odyssey? (I mean, obviouly while on ship, in space or flying around planets/stations)

Also, ignoring the CQC and foot sections, and speaking only about the game space sections, how does Update 13 performance fare against the abysmal original Odyssey release? Has it been improved at all?

My desktop PC is not precisely state of the art anymore, and while I'm able to run Horizons pretty decently even on high settings, I'm not sure it could handle a 50% performance reduction as hinted on some reviews like this one:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQeFfnEnP4Y


Any insight around this will be greatly appreciated.

 

[Lyamecron]

My guess on why Odyssey is more hardware "hungry" than Horizons is, that Odyssey uses a completely new lighting tech (for better or worse), PBR Shaders and new volumetric stuff. This coupled with a lot more detail on some of the models makes for a high demand on processing power.

 

[robbyp]

That was May 21. There have been updates since then. Don't take it that you'll see a 50% reduction. In the meanwhile, you have the choice for now and in the foreseeable future.

They have to move the code base on, so its inevitable at some time that the older Horizon code will lose content up to the newer code. That's just software engineering.

 

[Morbad]

Anyone knows why the performance changed so much (for the worse), even on the "common" areas between Horizons and Odyssey? (I mean, obviouly while on ship, in space or flying around planets/stations)

Even the old assets are subject to the new lighting and material shaders, plus whatever other global changes (and bugs) were made to the engine.

Also, ignoring the CQC and foot sections, and speaking only about the game space sections, how does Update 13 performance fare against the abysmal original Odyssey release? Has it been improved at all?

Performance has improved a lot since release, but not always consistently, not without some visual downgrades, and it's still quite a bit below Horizons.

 

[LordLocksley]

That was May 21. There have been updates since then. Don't take it that you'll see a 50% reduction. In the meanwhile, you have the choice for now and in the foreseeable future.

They have to move the code base on, so its inevitable at some time that the older Horizon code will lose content up to the newer code. That's just software engineering.

Thanks for the reply.

Yes I know the video I linked is a bit old at this time. That's why I asked if the performance has been improved since on the space sections of the game. I read that we will have the choice between the two clients, but obviously as you say, If I have to choose the older one due to performance reasons I will be surely missing content in the end.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Odyssey's worst performance is on foot, in stations, in settlements. In space it's fine, and Horizons 4.0 will only have space.

 

[LordLocksley]

Odyssey's worst performance is on foot, in stations, in settlements. In space it's fine, and Horizons 4.0 will only have space.

Well, that's also the case on Horizons. While we don't have ship interiors in POV, we are not confined to just "space": we do have station interiors during take offs and landings, asteroid belts for mining and bounting, and planetary surfaces on rocky non-atmosphere worlds with SRVs. And performance is worse there too than in space, as expected.

But even in deep space, you can see in the video I linked above that during the first Odyssey releases the FPS count got halved regardless. I hope this had been improved in the recent patches, though.

 

[Cmdr. Numa]

Station docking bay is not nearly as bad as the actual station concourse.

 

[galahad2069]

Performance has improved a lot since release, but not always consistently, not without some visual downgrades, and it's still quite a bit below Horizons.

That has been my main problem with Odyssey since the very beginning.
I get that the new planets with tenuous atmospheres can look great, nice sunsets and all that, but I have zero interest in on foot gameplay, and that's not even going to be an option in Horizons 4.0.

In space, on the other hand, Odyssey looks simply terrible:

• the starry background looks exactly as if a beginner astrophotographer totally ed up the postprocessing steps (the 16 to 8 bpp conversion in specific) - it's not that the images are dark, it's that the low intensity end of the histogram is completely missing in them
• special effects like explosions are simply awful compared to how they look like in Horizons, for all I can tell (based on videos made by other people)
• not even to mention what they did to poor PA volleys.

And what's even worse, such a massive visual downgrade comes with a performance loss, which is simply unjustifiable.

Given all the above, the only reason to play Horizons 4.0 instead of 3.8 would be the ability to instance with Odyssey players, but I'm not even sure they confirmed that to be the case. If it's not going to be possible, then it will only result in further fragmentation of the Open mode playerbase.

 

[Rat Catcher]

But even in deep space, you can see in the video I linked above that during the first Odyssey releases the FPS count got halved regardless. I hope this had been improved in the recent patches, though.

I check out performance in both Horizons and Odyssey last night (to respond to another request for info) - In space whilst still being a difference in performance between EDH & EDO (previously EDH was around 30% faster than EDO) it was no longer massive.

I do need to do more messing around to see if the results were accurate, but with temperature indooors last night of 30c, I wasn't too keen on pumping another 300W of heat into the room for any length of time!

Disclaimer: I do run current generation hardware and was comparing almost 400 FPS with around 460FPS @1440 - the difference on other hardware may be significantly noticeable.