Hi David,
thanks for letting us know what's going on.
I won't lie to you I am quite disappointed the game was released in this state, I and many others would've have been quite prepared
to wait longer for a polished release, and helping out with bug-testing in alphas and betas, its a shame to see all the OUTSTANDING hard work permanantly
tainted by a bad launch.
I stress again, I love a lot about Odyssey and have enjoyed it, despite all the issues.
Anywhere, we're here now.
From what I've and others found across the alpha and the past few days the problem sems to move depending on number of factors.
One consistent thing is Surface Settlements with active Conflict Zones are among the worse affected, something to do with NPC
presence and culling, especiallying culling.
People have decided to rip apart the frames for the game and found still, despite being told there was a working culling system for settlements,
for many it is still not in full effect and ends up rendering massive portions of the base you cannot see.
Another pain point is shadows in Orbital Starports, where, for me anyway, the difference between Medium and High shadows is 60% resource utilization,
and an average framerate gap of as much as 50 FPS.
I don't really understand this one, shadows in stations should be mostly static as long as not too many ships and people are walking around,
so it seems strange that it would have such a profound performance impact.
I think this is also a problem in 1 very specific reactor scene, but I cannot confirm it for sure, I know that volumetric smoke also causes a lot of problems,
particularly when the Power Reactor shuts down and flushes a bunch of smoke into the enviornment, this was present in the alpha.
Although, I have noted that it is only for specific settlemnts, and others behave quite a lot differently.
But, it's not just a low average FPS, there is consistent micro-stuttering in some of the worse affected areas.
and I mean, the frametime graph looks like a buzzsaw.
Other's have also reported that he latest graphics drivers have drastically increased performance, which makes me wonder if the game
is using hardware specific extentions that are not present, or not very effective on older cards and drivers.
If I were to guess frame pacing is also a problem, where, the game is struggling to complete frames at consistent intervals, but still doesn't
make full use of the GPU where possible due to this inherent... Inconsistency.
Yamiks noted that it was actually hurting his stream performance as the game was eating up GPU scheduling time it wasn't using in it's entirety,
often running at 50% utilization than less.
In fact for me there is often no difference between 1x and 2x supersampling in specific scenes.
Or Low graphics and Ultra.
I don't know enough about this stuff but this is what I've found. Hope it helps.
Below I've attached some screenshots of myself in locations using a 3080 (I'm playing on Linux so I expect to lack any recent hardware specific extensions,
my GPU is reported as a generic nVidia card / AMD card to the game).
Most of these screnshots have a resource utilization overlay with a frametime graph at the bottom (graphs are better better than logs and numbers).
The very dark scene with the "SRV" in the info panel is the On-Foot Training Scenario.
Oh, and I threw in a few fancy screenshots because I know the team enjoys them ; D
Apoligies I didn't realize there was an upload limit per-post
Here's the rest of them
Source: https://imgur.com/a/iB7VA8w
