Update 6 your thoughts?

Optimisation of the beta still ongoing (I want payed for this testing)
Notoriety, lame.
Detachment from Horizons is total.
Engineers and mat collection is even worse than previous.
Can't remove mods from weapons/suits, totally cretinous!
Planets look poor and nothing like the demo.
Generally being lied to since launch.
 
So what are your thoughts on Update 6? what's still broken, what do love or hate. Personally after just a few minutes I can see a major improvement but time will tell..
So far more bugs than fixes. AI scavengers know your coming before you can see them. still have but when leaving the plannet that show altitude as -1m when actually more than 50km and therefore can't super cruise because mass lock.

I knew this would happen. FDev needs to just fix the damn bugs before adding content. they add content and say bugs have been fixe when actually the bug morphs. for instance they said they fixed the larceny missions so the points of interest would show up. now you can't complete the mission because the item moves to a different system all together.
 
Well......i have a CTD each time i want to check my loadouts, so.....uninstalling again, i will come back maybe in a year, if not any better game around (not too hard at this point)
 
Uhm hate to be that guy. But not every black box from air crashes get recovered either.
True that.

Of course, if the crew that the FAA sends out to recover said black box return empty-handed, they still get paid and they don't get fined and lose reputation with the FAA either. :)
 
Whoa was VR blurry upon logging in for the first time... Reset to VR High default and it seems to be smooth but still feel blurrier. I'm not sure how I feel, need to play around with the settings some more.
Disable FSR to fix that
And for the love of god. Give us an option to remove carriers from the damn system map.
Being as this is one of the most repeated plea's since they were introduced I'm starting to think they simply can't.
I'm only trying to get acceptable frame rates at 1080p on the recommended GPU
From what I've heard FSR doesn't really work on 1080
Of course, if the crew that the FAA sends out to recover said black box return empty-handed, they still get paid and they don't get fined and lose reputation with the FAA either.
I think Fdev should disable rep loss and notoriety in Odyssey until all the mission issues are fixed, just have a no-pain fail flag until at least stable beta.

Update 6 pro's: Some higher frame rates for me (5 absolutely tanked my performance where I had to stop playing), maybe back to patch 4 levels - tho' I don't go near settlements. No more invisible rocks (fingers crossed 'cause someone up thread said some were still out there) and the stars corona's have been fixed.

The bad: no real improvement in performance, lighting or planet gen, just sticking plasters on the most glaring problems. Some bugs fixed but many, many more newly or even re-broken bugs - check out the issue tracker, about 7 pages of not even confirmed issues...
 
Disable FSR to fix that

Being as this is one of the most repeated plea's since they were introduced I'm starting to think they simply can't.

From what I've heard FSR doesn't really work on 1080

I think Fdev should disable rep loss and notoriety in Odyssey until all the mission issues are fixed, just have a no-pain fail flag until at least stable beta.

Update 6 pro's: Some higher frame rates for me (5 absolutely tanked my performance where I had to stop playing), maybe back to patch 4 levels - tho' I don't go near settlements. No more invisible rocks (fingers crossed 'cause someone up thread said some were still out there) and the stars corona's have been fixed.

The bad: no real improvement in performance, lighting or planet gen, just sticking plasters on the most glaring problems. Some bugs fixed but many, many more newly or even re-broken bugs - check out the issue tracker, about 7 pages of not even confirmed issues...
I think it is a great idea to drop the penalties and notoriety hits on the bugged mission types until they are completely fixed.
 
Update 6... is making me think seriously about taking a break until update 10. Had enough, for now.

Copy pasta from another thread:
  1. Spend 10 minutes flying to Mission POI, Mission objective detected.. Crash to Desktop.
  2. Repeat, Ok this time. Launch SLF. Get spammed by comms messages not reflecting the situation at all.
  3. Finish mission, go to do next one -> Goto line 1 and repeat.
Didn't have crashes before, 99% of the time at least, other than maybe sometimes in galaxy map.

Forget that for a bit, go flying to planets.
  • Most are too shiny (imo) and landscapes look a bit gooey for choice of a better word
  • Asset stamps sometimes stand out like saw thumbs where colours used don't blend with terrain
  • Tili...no, I'm not going there today.
  • Sometimes, there is beauty and natural looking planets to be found.
Thought I would have a nice chill day today playing Elite, but no. Update 6 doesn't want that to happen.

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No crashes.
No lag
No fps drops.
I'm in vr.
I've disabled fsr reverted back to pre patch 6 gfx settings.
Steam slider on 72% motion scroller assist off. That fixed the silvery tiny dots everywhere.
The pixilated mess on foot using fsr made it unplayable.
2.5k per lense I'm happy.
When I pushed slider up from default 72% to 100% (3k per lense approx) it all went slooooooowww rendering jitterfest.
I've most Windows gfx settings on detail rather than performance.
Hope this helps for vr cmdrs.
 
From what I've heard FSR doesn't really work on 1080
It seems to depend - for me at 1080, FSR on the ultra quality setting gives me an extra 10-20 FPS on surfaces/in buildings and looks better than the 0.85 traditional subsampling I was using before to get acceptable performance.

(FSR on any other setting is an unusable mess for me, though)
 
...good:
1.) Planet texture LOD is better to my eyes. As well as liking the terrain I'm seeing now. Ice worlds seem improved a good bit.
...
Bad:
...
3.) Pretty bad 'noise' or 'pixelation' effect now when the terminator on the planet is just entering or leaving view.
4.) Low angle texture on planets seems much worse to me now. Looks grainy or noisy even with built-in upscale.
...
The Very Bad:
1.) AMD FSR - I hate this. Worse performance and worse appearance I would love to have an option for the version from update 6.
...

I'd speculate the source of the problems in the: "bad" sections, fundamentally springs out of that first: "good"; Intimitely coupled with the game's lack of decent antialiasing.

Terrain LODs now have so much detail, both in frequency (how often elevation gradients change over distance) and amplitude (...by how much), that they just do not match up with output resolutions.

Take the crater outlook view from the plateau where the mission objective is located, in the Odyssey version of the SRV tutorial:
  • With Terrain detail: "Ultra+" in update 6, the distant slopes of the crater, and the land beneath them, looks like nothing to me -- it is just a random jumble of gray and yellow pixels, without any discernible underlying undulating ground surface they would occur across - exacerbated by them inherently aliasing differently for the left and right eye, in VR. (It does of course not help that I look at them with the local star right behind me either, which makes the lighting rather flat.)
  • Lower terrain quality settings mitigates this, but reduces terrain detail to unacceptable levels - everything becomes blurry.
  • With update 5, the aliasing had been greatly ameliorated, to the point I could get the shimmering down a manageable degree, with: "Ultra for capture", by applying x1.25 supersampling. With update 6, not even x2.0 helps. This has nothing do with CAS or FSR - it should be all down to the LOD balancing.

Ever since its "alphas", Odyssey's planets have looked to me much like when you go at it with the spray can tool in a paint program on a monochrome screen - all areas are two-tone fuzzballs, whose aliasing causes them to "fizz", as your vantage point moves. This is exacerbated by the new materials, which often feel excessively shiny, to the point a low albedo surface seems able to go from white to black over only a degree or two of changing angle to the light source...

With Horizons, everything was blurry, endless pseudo-random noise (incidently: Due to its softenss, it actually seems to FSR pretty well, if a quick test I made is anything to go by); With Odyssey - a lot looks like endlessly dithering granite patterning, which looks a ton more interesting and varied, but quickly becomes so overwhelmingly dense that it comes across as noise anyway. :7


The terrain generation team has the unenviable task of having to create a system that not only just-in-time composites multiple sources of elevation data (some of which likely likewise generated at time of being needed, as opposed to be loaded from a (much maligned) library of assets), to generate life-like patches of terrain geometry, and layers (and types-) of texture to go with them, containing additional detail to what is in meshes, before those details transition over to actual geometry in the next more detailed LOD (these textures are apart from the "wallpaper" ground textures); But need to do this for stretches of land that are unthinkable in most games.

In most games, the map makers will have been able to hand-model, or overnight pre-render a high fidelity, but low play-time rendering impact imposter for, say, a distant mountain - maybe with baked lighing and shadows - or if there is a day/night cycle and weather: A prebaked mesh and/or normal map that an adapted version of their dynamic lighting model can work with. They can also precalculate- and hand tailor occlusion culling, so that no matter where your are, no computing is wasted on evaluating stuff you can't see from there, anyway.

With the terrain generating as you play, however, there is no affording such pre-assembled background scenery, lighting, and optimisations - it has to all be produced on the fly, and lit dynamically, because the environment is unknown until generated, huge, and, although in itself static, moving within its star system.


So if a pixel on-screen shows, let's say a forest area: For an accurate reproduction its value should represent the average of all that is contained within the part of that forest area that the pixel projects over, including that tiny snow-covered clearing in its middle, but we do of course not have the infinite resources to sample at such resolution for something that just takes up a single pixel on the rendered frame, so we just look at what is right in the centre of that pixel, which can be either the tree coverage, or the tiny clearing, making the pixel flick between green and white as we look around - this is aliasing - in the case of textures usually dealt with through the use of mipmaps; polygon edges requires different dealings with.

Conversly, if that's not a clearing down there, but something like a lake, in the middle of a forest, maybe it should cause overpowering glinting when observed from the right angle, beyond the percentage of land it takes up - much like our sparkly snow. It quickly becomes complex. :7

...and all this is just the bit where you render frames of the already generated LODs. -The generation of the LODs itself confers a stage of aliasing, as you sample from your various heightmap sources, bashing them together, and try to match the resolution of the produced LOD to how many pixels it will be drawn across on-screen (...so dependent on distance from the observer, resolution, and field of view), in order to avoid both opposing extremes of aliasing and blurring. Here too, you can not afford to average millimetre scale detail into a one-texel-for-an-acre LOD, and can't have predone mipmaps of a lower scale heightmap, since it will itself become the product of several source ones when you get closer, so you end up taking data only from the larger scale heightmaps, and thus produce soft low resolution normal maps, and consequently mile-wide ice craters that look like little plastic toys... but then, when going to rendering frames, maybe you draw a ground texture onto that low resolution bottom layer, that has magnitudes higher resolution, and which aliases so strongly that it looks like somebody has poured baking soda on the ice (...although one would assume it should have mipmaps)...


If LOD biasing is an insurmountable problem, with the range of scales from astronomical to human on ground, maybe we need to swallow the cost of (render time) filtering balanced more toward quality than performance as some stage, or maybe the terrain procgen needs to implement an extra factor (assuming it doesn't already), to produce LODs that are built with anisotropy in mind, so that the distant LODs in a vista seen from the ground gets lower mesh density, than the same seen from above (...but the same texture density - we do have anisotropic filtering (...and hopefully mipmaps of generated textures), supposedly)... I am just blathering anyway...


FSR is not the cause of a problem here; Only the magnifying glass that makes it stand out that much more clearly. -As it blows up its source frames, it inherently also brings every imperfection within them to front, "crawling ant" jaggies and all (I got one plain that I was landed on, appearing as if it was "swimming" across the view when I took off). Hence AMD's stressing that the source imagery must be rendered with good antialiasing. This might be slighty less of a problem with DLSS (at the cost of other artifacts), since it (to oversimplify) has temporal antialiasing (TAA) "built in".

(Somebody might feel inclined to bring up UE5's "Nanite"... If so, they'll have to themselves bring technical insight into its inner workings and shortfalls, because I have none. :7)
 
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Thats a really good explanation and interesting read. Thanks for writing that up!

I will point out that for me and what I’ve been able to test, FSR is much worse on my hardware and monitor than the built in SS. Its really that loss of quality that Im lamenting. In update 5 CAS provided much better views without that “over sharpening” look. Since there is no direct way to compare in 6 I cant know for sure it would be better but Id at least liked to have seen it.
 
In update 5 CAS provided much better views without that “over sharpening” look. Since there is no direct way to compare in 6 I cant know for sure it would be better but Id at least liked to have seen it.

You can compare, if you have an AMD card, by turning CAS on and choosing its level in the driver. It works better for me, too.

You just don't get much control over what FSR does because you have to select one of the presets, and then sharpening is performed by little elves while you're not looking.
 
...Since there is no direct way to compare in 6 I cant know for sure it would be better but Id at least liked to have seen it.

In addition to what Retropolitan wrote: If you don't have an AMD card, I believe you can "hack in" CAS, using a post-processing injector called "ReShade".
Ultra Quality FSR is x0.77, which is a little higher than the game's own x0.75 factor - maybe compare with that and with x0.85... :7

(EDIT: No way to compare the other way around, anymore, though - that is: update 5 terrain with FSR. -I gave it a go with injected FSR for some time before update 6 dropped - wasn't much of a fan, but it was frankly, to me, not as bad as update 6 is even without any scaling trickery.)
 
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Would like to know if the dropping of flashlights from ground NPC's was a design choice or a bug. Combined with the fact that they attack ships / SRV's further away from base makes the usual scav kill missions much more of a challenge at night. Tried changing my typical operations MO to initially activating power at the base so the scavs are easier to see and kill but often the power station is heavily guarded. They also swarm on initial attack which makes it more difficult to accomplish mission without resorting to SRV kills to thin them out. If they add L-6 rocket launchers to scav teams, will make these missions extremely difficult and higher risk.

CMDR Marcus "Scav-Hunter" Bulltarsky
 
You can compare, if you have an AMD card, by turning CAS on and choosing its level in the driver. It works better for me, too.

You just don't get much control over what FSR does because you have to select one of the presets, and then sharpening is performed by little elves while you're not looking.

NVIDIA :(
 
In addition to what Retropolitan wrote: If you don't have an AMD card, I believe you can "hack in" CAS, using a post-processing injector called "ReShade".
Ultra Quality FSR is x0.77, which is a little higher than the game's own x0.75 factor - maybe compare with that and with x0.85... :7

(EDIT: No way to compare the other way around, anymore, though - that is: update 5 terrain with FSR. -I gave it a go with injected FSR for some time before update 6 dropped - wasn't much of a fan, but it was frankly, to me, not as bad as update 6 is even without any scaling trickery.)

I'm actually forced to 0.65. That's to hold 45FPS almost everywhere AND not have to listen to my GPU Fan pulsing up and down. I can't hold it at anything above that in any settlement / dense plant area / concourse. That's something I might try though but wouldn't the game be doing the upsampling before an external parasite program like that could get to it?
 
...That's something I might try though but wouldn't the game be doing the upsampling before an external parasite program like that could get to it?
Yes -- pretty sure that's what happened in update 5 too, though; First upscale, then CAS -- only using the upscaling routine from FidelityFX instead of the game's own. (...and the same with FSR, but this time the game does not give us the option to choose how much to sharpen).
 
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