Nearly 2 years have gone by from the initial Kickstarter funding of Elite: Dangerous. I could of benchmarked the initial testing phases but, wanted to give a better view of performance after the game has been officially released.
'The colours look good but why is elite dangerous anti-aliasing so bad? I can't believe that even with super high-res headset, those edges on the station are still strobing away - so distracting, so awful - and another dude replies: '. it looks even worse in headset. Elite: Dangerous PvE - Mobius. We are continuing to work on additional anti-aliasing techniques and hope to be able to share more news on these improvements soon. Elite: Dangerous, is the next installment in the seminal series of games that started with Elite. Once again you are invited to head for the stars, take a ship and 100 credits to make money legally or illegally - trade, bounty-hunt, pirate, assassinate your way across the galaxy.
The Elite series started out in 1984 on the BBC Micro , then a sequel Frontier was released in 1993. Fast forward 20 years later with 25,681 people and a total amount of £1,578,316 pledged through Kickstarter, we finally have the first person space combat and trading MMO Elite: Dangerous. The game was designed by David Braben and developed by Frontier Developments on the Cobra multiplatform engine.
I won’t be going into much detail about gameplay as I only put in a few hours and, as a mass multiplayer online game that would be unfair. Official SLI and Crossfire support is not available so our benchmark results will cover single GPUs on the 1920×1080 , 2560×1440 and 4K resolutions.
Benchmark Components
Elite Dangerous Benchmark System
CPU | i7 3930K |
Motherboard | Asus P9X79 Deluxe |
RAM | Kingston Hyper-X 16GB 1600mhz |
HDD/SSD | Crucial M550 256GB |
GPU | Galax GTX970 EXOC 4GB , MSI R9-290 Gaming 4S |
Monitor | Asus PB287Q 28″ 4K 60Hz 1MS |
PSU | Corsair AX1200W |
OS | Windows 8.1 |
Drivers | Nvidia: 347.09 WHQL Beta, AMD: Catalyst Omega 14.12 |
Testing Methodology
To test out how Elite: Dangerous performs I went with a custom 60 second run. There’s no built-in benchmark tool available.
I took a simple tutorial dog fight mission where earth is visible and 2 other friendly ships. You can see the exact run below in the video.
I used the High preset for all resolutions which is the highest available quality setting. The Anti-Aliasing method used in High is SMAA, I disabled Bloom and prompted for a slightly higher FOV value than the preset.Elite: Dangerous 1920×1080 Benchmark
The GTX970 and R9-290 perform close to 160 FPS on average at 1080p. How to install waves v9 crack. The game runs extremely well with no strange frame drops. For those of you that have a 120Hz or 144Hz monitor with a powerful single GPU, you will easily be able to run your monitors refresh rate.
HD Screenshot Pointer focus registration code.
2560×1440 Benchmark
At 1440p the GTX970 drops to 94 FPS average while the R9-290 is over 105 FPS. Minimums are 76 and 81 frames per second respectively for the graphics cards. The guild 2 renaissance how to install mods. Yet again there is no visible frame drops or big fluctuations for min and averages.
2560×1440 Screenshot Get times new roman font for word for mac.
Elite: Dangerous 4K Benchmark
At 4K we see a drastic fall to under 51 FPS average on both GPUs. The GTX970 seems to cope slightly better at 4K than the R9-290, while at 1440p it was performing 15% slower. Minimums are in the 40 FPS range but the game doesn’t feel sluggish on either cards.
4K Screenshot
CPU Usage
To test CPU usage I ran the game at 640×480 at the highest preset possible. The game seems to utilize all cores as well as hyperthreading. On my 6-Core Intel we see utilization of all 12 threads ranging from 10-40%.
VRAM Usage
Splm 12 keygen torrent. At the highest of settings the 1920×1080 and 2560×1440 resolutions are just below 2Gb VRAM usage. When going up to 4K we see usage hit 2.4Gb. The game isn’t very VRAM hungry with the use of SMAA (Enhanced Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing).
RAM Usage
Total memory usage with Windows 8.1 is roughly 2Gb-2.2Gb across all the benchmark resolutions. Most modern laptops and desktop rigs have 3Gb or more RAM. For most gamers memory usage shouldn’t be a factor.
Conclusion
The game performs extraordinary well even with a high-end single GPU at 4K , that thanks to the well optimized Cobra engine. The effects are beautiful but image quality seems to lean towards a minimal art design, something that is a standard in flying or space simulators. You might think I’m overly critizing the game developers but, overall the visuals do blend well.
Anti-aliasing Fxaa
Something I found interesting was the learning curve. With a mouse and keyboard you’re going to have a hard time, for space simulator fans you probably already have your flight sticks ready for action anyway.
Elite Dangerous Anti Aliasing Software
Elite: Dangerous is massive , a 1 to 1 recreation of the Milky Way (400 billion star systems) it’s all the freedom you could ever ask for. How it compares to EVE: Online or the upcoming Star Citizen we will have to wait and see.
If you have any questions about the benchmark please ask in the comment section below and I will be glad to answer.
Comments
- I would say that's what is available for 1080p. But this difficulty to read text is relative. Some folks might be trying to read text with the Rift in an in-game resolution that isn't 1920x1080. The three things I remember to look out for are: Oculus quality at max, blur off, and make sure resolution is 1920x1080.0
- Note that for Elite Dangerous all the text can also be read if you put your face closer to it. Not a good solution, but it works.
- If you have the horsepower. Turn on FXAA, enable DSR, and bump the resolution to at least 2560x1440. The anti-aliasing will make text much more readable from a distance. You'll need at least a GTX-780ti and a fast computer to do this, though.
You can also just move physically closer to the panels to make them physically bigger. Move the IR camera sufficiently far away so you have enough room to maneuver your head in the cockpit. - If you have the horsepower. Turn on FXAA, enable DSR, and bump the resolution to at least 2560x1440. The anti-aliasing will make text much more readable from a distance. You'll need at least a GTX-780ti and a fast computer to do this, though.
You can also just move physically closer to the panels to make them physically bigger. Move the IR camera sufficiently far away so you have enough room to maneuver your head in the cockpit.
Huh, I hadn't thought of that. Does the rift support that resolution? I just thought it was 1080p. - Huh, I hadn't thought of that. Does the rift support that resolution? I just thought it was 1080p.
If I understand it, supersampling is rendering the game at a higher resolution, and then downsampling it to the monitor's native resolution, in this case the Rift's 1080p. You judge the difference:
http://imgur.com/Y7ei7Dx0