General Use AMD's gift to fix two of Odyssey's worst technical problems

[Taerlyn]

Elite has always had terrible jaggies and problems with sparkling highlights. Image stability has always been an issue. Odyssey seems to have made it worse somehow (broken SMAA? Despite claims that it was fixed) and also introduced serious performance issues. A 3080 Ti can't play at 60fps at 4K, which is sort of ridiculous.

Frontier, you can resolve both these issues with one relatively easy action: Implement FSR 2.0. It's temporally stable and includes its own built-in smoother so all those jagged edges will turn into nice smooth lines and the image will resolve detail much more stably, and at the same time, it will run better. I really feel like Odyssey's visuals would look much better/more modern if it just had a stable, smooth image (since almost all other games use TAA these days) and of course people would get better framerates, which always makes people happy.

This unfortunately won't help exceptionally old GPUs (worse than 570 or 1060) but those GPUs basically can't run Odyssey at all anyway. Might as well do something which seems to be relatively easy going by documentation to help the majority of your playerbase.

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

All of these upscaler things are mainly made to run 4K displays with 2K resolutions. A big part of that's because at 4K people can barely tell the difference anymore. DLSS already exists. You don't hear people talking about that?

Anyway, more frames is something everyone can agree on.

 

[Taerlyn]

All of these upscaler things are mainly made to run 4K displays with 2K resolutions. A big part of that's because at 4K people can barely tell the difference anymore. DLSS already exists. You don't hear people talking about that?

Anyway, more frames is something everyone can agree on.

DLSS only works for RTX 20/30 GPUs. Most players have 10/16-series and many have old AMD 500-series GPUs. FSR 2.0 would cover all of them. Also, DLSS basically requires that the engine implement TAA to function. FSR 2.0 has fewer inputs required deep in the rendering engine, which means it's more likely Frontier would be able to support it in the weird architecture that is Cobra Engine.

Also upscalers work just fine at 1440p too and Odyssey has SUCH bad aliasing that I would bet good money it'd look better in FSR 2.0 Quality mode than native at 1080p.

IF they added DLSS support, I'd love that too, but it hasn't happened yet and I don't see it coming. FSR 2.0 is a more realistic option, and the game already supports FSR 1.0. Come on, FDev, bump that version number.

 

[Kondiq]

Why more people don't suggest this? I told this in chat on twitch streams and everyone ignored it. The game has terrible aliasing and performance in Odyssey is still far from perfect, especially when you want to hop in VR once in a while.

Implementing FSR 2.0 takes around an hour on some custom engine. It's trivial in most cases and I think it's nothing they wouldn't be able to do in a week if there were any issues. More people would return to the game, cause some of my friends stopped playing because of the performance. I play with only one friend and that's because only us two upgraded our GPUs...

Check this video. It's really easy to add:

 

[DeeJayMMM]

slight problem, it requires dx12 or vulcan, elite is dx11.

 

[Kondiq]

slight problem, it requires dx12 or vulcan, elite is dx11.

Well, in that case... They have over 500 developers. They can just use a library to easily port the DX11 game to DX12 without using any of the DX12 features, but enabling them to use DLSS and/or FSR 2.0. Microsoft provided such libraries 2 years ago as Open Source projects:

GitHub - microsoft/D3D12TranslationLayer: A library containing utilities for mapping higher-level graphics work to D3D12

A library containing utilities for mapping higher-level graphics work to D3D12 - GitHub - microsoft/D3D12TranslationLayer: A library containing utilities for mapping higher-level graphics work to D...

github.com

GitHub - microsoft/D3D11On12: The Direct3D11-On-12 mapping layer

The Direct3D11-On-12 mapping layer. Contribute to microsoft/D3D11On12 development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Using these libraries wouldn't give extra benefits for using DX12 (like if they would do it properly without the libraries), but adding FSR 2.0 would be trivial. And yes, these libraries do almost all the work for the developers. They directly translate DX11 calls to DX12 without any changes to the engine.

 

[Northpin]

Implementing FSR 2.0 takes around an hour on some custom engine.

Using these libraries wouldn't give extra benefits for using DX12 (like if they would do it properly without the libraries), but adding FSR 2.0 would be trivial. And yes, these libraries do almost all the work for the developers. They directly translate DX11 calls to DX12 without any changes to the engine.

Cobra is a proprietary engine.
And you do make a lot of assumptions regarding what's possible and how fast it may be implemented in the said Engine

Sure, they did show that a lot of the new tech can be implemented in a game using a DX12 Cobra engine (JWE2)

However, it seems to me that Elite Dangerous Cobra Engine is a highly modified/customized Cobra engine - since it's still DX11
So that's not going to make things easier.

The fact that it's a niche old game, that EDO got a disastrous launch - does not create the premise of getting a good return of investment

 

[Kondiq]

That's why I suggested use of the mentioned libraries. Porting to DirectX12 in the proper way would be a huge task, but the libraries translate DX11 calls to DX12 calls with minimal effort from programmers required, but with less advantages of the porting too. I'd like to see optional DirectX 12 experimental mode with FSR 2.0 in the game.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

That's why I suggested use of the mentioned libraries. Porting to DirectX12 in the proper way would be a huge task, but the libraries translate DX11 calls to DX12 calls with minimal effort from programmers required, but with less advantages of the porting too. I'd like to see optional DirectX 12 experimental mode with FSR 2.0 in the game.

Do they translate the calls at compile time or at run time? Because if you're having performance issues, and translating at run time, then that adds overhead.

 

[Kondiq]

The second library - D3D11on12 is more like an example of how to do it with the first library. If you use the second library to run it, it adds overhead, but not as much as when it first launched. You may or may not have some overhead in memory, but there's definitely overhead in CPU usage, but not in performance of main core that runs the game's logic, but in a way that it's using other cores/threads for translating. So if you have like 6/12 cores/threads CPU, it wouldn't make a difference. Most of my CPU's threads do almost nothing during playing Elite.

The second library wouldn't help with implementing FSR 2.0 though, it's more to look how you implement the use of the first library (D3D12 Tranlation Layer) to build a project in a way that the D3D11on12 works.

 

[Ski'Thor]

They would have done it, if it were this easy. No?

 

[Kondiq]

Like they've added ship interiors? At this point we would even take just walking around the cockpit to get a feel of the ship's scale. It feels way different in VR than in flatscreen and VR kind of ruined flatscreen version for me. Like in VR I prefer Type-9 to Corvette for the huge canopy around me, even seeing what's behind me, while in Corvette I need to lean forward to look above me.

Anyway, I'd like to believe they never heard of such library and I'm just pointing them in he right direction. It doesn't help that all the decision are made by the management and we can all agree that not all of them are great. Adding DLSS/FSR 2.0 would be a great decision from marketing standpoint and QoL for players, but it may be too late for that, if they're not planning for longetivity of the game anymore.

 

[Northpin]

. Adding DLSS/FSR 2.0 would be a great decision from marketing standpoint

DSLL/FSR2.0 would help only the people to run it better in 4k.
It wont do much for people that are struggling in 1080p

And if the majority of people are playing in 1080p while some have strong enough computers to get 60fps in 4k - then why bother wasting precious resources - which they have almost none at the time - for adding fluff.
Again, if it would have been trivial, they've had added it by now.

And not at last, the game is still heavily cpu bound - dlss/fsr20 would not help that at all.
So better they focus on the real bottlenecks before going for dlss/fsr2.0 which would be something like “Nero fiddles while Rome burns”

 

[Kondiq]

FSR 2.0 would help in any scenario. When I had GTX 970 the only option for me to play Odyssey was to enable FSR 1.0 in Performance mode, which is terrible, as interface also gets blurry and unreadable. FSR 2.0 uses temporal data and doesn't affect the interface. It's a huge difference for people with lower end GPUs. And Elite isn't CPU bound. With my RTX 3080 12GB, the GPU is on 100% usage in places where frames drop below my refresh rate - when landing on planets and around and inside stations.

DLSS also isn't only for 4K. I use it to play Cyberpunk in 1080p with Ray Tracing on Psycho settings and it doesn't look worse than native when I play. When you compare screenshots, the difference is visible only on very far away objects - like some ad banners far from you. On the other hand, I can't stand DLSS in Red Dead Redemption 2, so I play without it. It depends on the game if it looks good.

FSR 2.0 would be way better than the first version and when I play Elite in VR, I need to use FSR for good enough framerate anyway. My friends also would be more keen to return to the game, as most of them don't have RTX GPUs and they tried playing Odyssey with first FSR, which looks terrible, so they told that they won't return to the game until the performance is better or if FSR is not as low quality.

 

[Northpin]

A 3080 Ti can't play at 60fps at 4K, which is sort of ridiculous.

Only if you are CPU limited
else there are many people that play and get 60 fps at 4k on ultra running RTX3080 cards.
One single example here

 

[Kondiq]

Only if you are CPU limited
else there are many people that play and get 60 fps at 4k on ultra running RTX3080 cards.

Exactly. My friend was very surprised when I showed him a benchmark in which his old i7 was slower than current gen i3 CPU. Some people buy high end GPUs without upgrading the rest of the platform. That is ridiculous.

 

[Northpin]

And Elite isn't CPU bound.

It definitely is in settlements

With my RTX 3080 12GB, the GPU is on 100% usage in places where frames drop below my refresh rate - when landing on planets and around and inside stations.

That doesnt mean it's not CPU bound.

Search Morbad's posts related to Odyssey performance here on the forums.
He did performed a serious amount of testing trying to find and workaround bottlenecks in ED.