Horizons PC Performance and Horizons - Good/Bad?

[Colonel Kenney]

I haven an I7 with 8 cores, 16Gb DDR3 on an SSD with a Geforce 960GTX ... Runs fine for me with everything maxed on planets and everything.

Completely happy with performance.

Now star citizen on the same rig performs like a pig and its not even worth bothering.

 

[Creep]

My experience on planets is pretty meh. I have the terrain work set all the way to the left, with terrain quality set to medium (maybe even low sometimes).

I get about 10-19 FPS on the ground with the SRV.

Space itself runs me at about 40-50 FPS, I never get 60 FPS, probably because my card can't handle such things.

My rig:

Intel Core i7-4790 VPU @ 3.6 GHz (8CPUs)
8 GB RAM
AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB w/ AMD Crimson 15.11 drivers
Windows 10 64-bit

It's a mid range system that I do pretty well in mid-high settings. But planets have pretty much killed my framerate, regardless of minimizing quality and GPU performance.

Suggestions anyone? I'm not very technically savvy. I know I need a better graphics card that's for sure, but that's not going to happen for quite a while.

 

[Cyda]

Suggestions anyone? I'm not very technically savvy. I know I need a better graphics card that's for sure, but that's not going to happen for quite a while.

Have you tried different 'terrain work' settings? I was getting 20-30 fps with that slider all the way left, so I moved it almost all the way to the right and it was much better fps.

 

[Garbarrage]

My "cheekily" below spec laptop, i5 4228U 2.6-3.1ghz dual core, with Iris integrated graphics and 8gig RAM, ran ED pretty well on Medium to High settings, can't even load the menu.

Task manager shows the CPU pushed to and beyond its limits, before the menu screen loads. Sometimes gets as far as the shader screen, before freezing up.

Looks like an upgrade is in order, but won't be for quite a while yet. Probably going to bow out for a while, as there's only so many pirates one can kill before it stops being fun. Happy to leave my money with FD until I can upgrade though. They've done an awesome job keeping the game playable for me until now, and I know the money will be put to good use adding content for when I am able to log into Horizons.

Little bit deflated by it, but them's the breaks.

 

[Creep]

Have you tried different 'terrain work' settings? I was getting 20-30 fps with that slider all the way left, so I moved it almost all the way to the right and it was much better fps.

Yeah, I've set the terrain quality and material quality both to low, and set the slider all the way to the right; best I can get is almost 20 fps, averaging at about 12-19 FPS still. But I'm going to assume it's just my graphics card, because I still get the extreme framerate down to 12-15 FPS when arriving at space stations or flying in populated systems in supercruise (even in solo play).

 

[Chronverge]

I recently upgraded from smiliar specs to this:

i7 860 OC @ 3,5 Ghz
16GB RAM
Gainward GTX 660 2GB
Win 7 Pro 64

The upgrade is powerfull enough for most modern titles (new Battlefront i.e....), unfortunally ED Horizons, despite it's now 64 bit, has also dropped my FPS down to 20-45. Lowering GFX settings did improve FPS, but the image quality was not worth the trade off.

The monitor tools I use on a second screen show me CPU usage @ 15%, RAM @ 45% and VRAM @ 95%. This was also the case pre Horizons, but I was getting 55-120 FPS plus Reshade and such enabled.

I know that ED is a very GFX hunrgy game, but a 64bit software not utilizing CPU usage more, seems a little odd from a software<->hardware optimization standpoint.

If you should upgrade your GFX card, it will definitely make sence for you in general. But I'm not sure if a GTX 700 series card might bottleneck your CPU. Let alone be much of a help for playing Horizons in a matter you enjoy.

Sadly, Horizons sticks its tongue out at me.

Intel i7 860 (2.8 GHz)
8 Gb RAM
Windows 7
Nvidia GTS 240 with 4Gb RAM, DX 11.

It's presumably just the graphics card that's below the minimum spec, and I'm scratching my head a bit trying to decide what to do.

I switched over to ChromeOS on both my desktop and my laptop nearly three years ago, and I'm not a big gamer. I only use this Windows PC to play Elite nowadays. Elite Dangerous season one has been eminently playable on it. I'm a lifetime Kickstarter backer and I was really looking forward to the subsequent expansions.

However, I've been looking at graphics cards and it seems that to get Horizons to run I'd be looking at somewhere near £100 for a card like the GTX 750 Ti. That's probably not going to happen, just to play Horizons.

I can carry on playing season one quite happily, but I wondered what cheaper graphics cards might handle Horizons. The minimum spec card mentioned, the GTX 470, doesn't seem to be available new from Amazon or on a quick Google search outside.

If I want a card for under £50 that will run Horizons, is secondhand from eBay my only option?

 

[Alpha087]

i7 3770k
GTX 970 4 GB
Windows 7
SSD

I get a mostly stable 60 FPS at 1080p with all settings to the Ultra defaults, save for Terrain stuff which I lowered to High. I'm getting dips into the 40s whenever I enter Orbital Glide but it goes away as soon as that ends, no clue what's actually causing it though. I also noticed that being in turret mode on the SRV and looking at the dust particle effects that the vehicle kicks up behind it when it moves seems to dip the framerates into 50s.

Overall playable, although I'd really like to figure how to stop those drops in Glide, or at least figure out what's causing that.

 

[DragonIV]

Haven't been down to the planets yet, but I've noticed a performance bump in space/stations.

System:
Core2/quad 6600
GTX 650 Ti boost 1gb
8gb ram
win 7 ssd, game on hdd

play a borderless 1680x1050 screen, no oversampling, all other settings maxed, widest field of view

1.4: 60-70 FPS in space, 25-35 in stations.
1.5: 70-80 FPS in space, 35-45 in stations.

Color me surprised.

 

[BIZZNAWICH]

I'm running an ASUS ROG laptop on Windows 8
i7 quad core 3.5 ghz+ w/hyperthreading
Nvidea GTX770m graphics w/3gb.
20gb system ram
500gig solid state drive

So far no problems/crashes except for the few in game bugs I've come across but no crashes have resulted.

There was one lock up having to do with the SRV on planetside which I reported.

All I needed to do was esc and save to desktop and go right back in and all was ok again.

 

[Maro-Val]

Intel i7 960 @ 3.2 GHz)
16 Gb RAM
Windows 7
EVGA GTX 780 with 3 GB
SSD

Ultra on 1680x1050 no prob.

Better graphics with horizons and a lot smoother.

 

[Spyke]

Thanks Chronverge.

If the 7xx series sounds like a gamble with my CPU, I may just wait until the 960 drops in price to something that makes sense just to continue with the Elite expansions.