ALL Graphics Settings in Elite Dangerous FULLY Explained! (Ultra, High, Medium, Low, VR, 4K, 8K)

[@Exigeous]

NOTE ON ODYSSEY: Yes, when Odyssey comes out I'll certainly be updating this for whatever changes we get there.

[@alratekk2631]

I just wanted to let you know that I figured out what jet-cone quality does. It alters the quality of things *in front* of the jet-cones, not the jet-cones themselves. For example, asteroids or bobbleheads.

[@Tcherkrick]

Great video! Looking forward to the next video on odyssey!

[@centronox]

You get a like and a sub for all your hard work sir, thank you for this. Look forward to seeing the new video after Odyssey comes out.

[@kato2182]

so i used all these settings for odyssey and i’m forced to keep supersampling to 1.0 anything lower and game is so crap

[@mrtrainee]

so what's the deal with the "ULTRAFORCECAPTURE" setting for terrain?

[@Exigeous]

This is BY FAR my most ambitious video ever - as such there are likely a few mistakes in it so I'll update this comment with new information. Specifically Volumetric Effects were impossible to work out making me think there is likely a bug somewhere. Please also remember I can only test with the machine available to me and as such this should be seen as a general guide to give you an idea of the impact of each setting, in short your mileage may vary - and greatly. It was a lot of fun to put together and has been on my to-do list since literally the day I started this channel, 2.5 years ago (as of writing). Enjoy! NOTE: I've linked a forum thread where I was discussing all this during my research and the Reddit thread for the video in the description if you're so inclined.

[@BendeBoas]

Thanks again, CMDR. Great video. o7

[@rempha]

Thank you for your effort on putting toghether all this information. This is very useful to optimize especially when I am running ED on my non-gaming laptop (NVIDIA Quadro M1200 which is based on GeForce GTX 960M).

[@thomgadget]

Fantastic work on this, very informative and extremely well presented. Thanks!

[@CmdrPPanda]

Bravo ,Bravo , Bravo . Exquisite piece of work. Nice to have this in your Exigepedia :)

[@acegh0st]

I was just noticing that there is volumetric fog falling from the ceiling when you are sitting inside a station. Perhaps that is somewhere you could test the effects of the volumetric effects setting?

[@HMS_Thunderwolf]

Start of the video: this should be interesting 6mins in: ok, i need a note pad....

[@Exigeous]

Well that's why I add the chapter marks, so it's easy enough to skip around and use it as a "tool" when you come back.

[@HMS_Thunderwolf]

@@Exigeous doesn't remove my need for a note pad, but that was helpful.

[@tsilb]

25 mins in: I don't know why I'm still here, but I... can't... look... away...

[@gamesinsight3800]

Also needed Notepad :) Directly marking which settings I could use or not given the impact ;)

[@plutoidrepublic2765]

@@tsilb 500 years in: my skeleton must inhale this data

[@GhostGiraffe]

Great work! I had "optimized" these using trial and error but had no real idea what they really did. Now I realize I had a bunch of things wrong and have not only made changes but also learned what they do. Thanks so much for all this work.

[@Exigeous]

You're most welcome my friend, high praise coming from you for sure. Very glad you found it useful as it really was a shit ton of work to pull it all together.

[@GhostGiraffe]

@@Exigeous The biggest "small" improvement are quality of the orbit lines. No longer so aliased! It's a small improvement that makes such a difference.

[@darkzide7558]

THANK YOU for making this video.

[@Exigeous]

No no Darkzide, thank YOU!

[@wileywilson]

@@Exigeous. Yeah, thanks for doing this man. Really appreciate it. I remember pouring over "Nvidia's Comprehensive Skyrim tweak guide" when that game came out, for hours! BTW, I'm looking forward to your updated guide when the Nvidia 3000 series land! ;)

[@DeanCalaway]

Regarding Jet Cones, I found very odd a ~14% impact for no visual difference, so I went to check it out and at 1080p there is a big one, I just made a video about it for anyone that cares to check. TL;DR: at Medium the Jet Cone gets very jaggy at 1080p, I would recommend High unless to anyone unless it's really chugging the system down. I'm guessing Exigious runs at a very high resolution that is just cleaning up that edge, but at 1080p there is a day/night difference.

[@yuboon]

I'm not sure why this is not being upvoted. Great job man.

[@FeralEngineer]

Special thanks for the performance cost of each setting! I had stable 60 fps with an OC'ed 1060, upgraded to 2070S, cranked all settings up and started getting severe frame rate drops during neutron star encounters and less severe ones on stations. This video definitely saved me a couple of hours in optimizing "performance vs. quality" I'd perform through mostly uneducated A-B testing.

[@Sean_Lightning_OBrien]

As a VR player this is invaluable. Cheers

[@Farrcast7]

Share your settings?

[@Monody512]

FX Quality also controls the ripple distortion effects seen when entering supercruise or hyperspace, and around Thargoid ships. Setting it to medium or lower disables these effects. I personally dislike these effects, so I run on medium.

[@Exigeous]

Thanks for sharing - I certainly didn't intend this to be exhaustive to every single thing that's effected, as it was already a shit ton of work to figure out what I did. So I appreciate you sharing this.

[@HudsonPeter]

This is amazing. Thanks CMDR Exigeous for doing this research. I have a question and an observation. The question is: I assume you only changed one setting at a time, but what were the baseline settings from which you were making those individual changes? I.e. for the tests were all settings at "preset ULTRA" and then you did the tests one setting at a time? The deeper reason for asking this question is that I wonder about "compound effects". That is, is the performance hit for setting Shadows to Ultra (25%) in any way dependent on the setting for Ambient Occlusion, or Volumetric Effects, or Texture Quality, or Anti-Aliasing? As presented, there's an assumption that all of the settings are independent of each other. This is a reasonable assumption (I think). And also, if it wasn't the case, it would mean there would be an intractable number of tests that would need to be run. If there are 4-5 levels for each setting (Ultra/High/Med/Low/Off) and there are 18 different settings to twiddle, then there would be over a million different tests needed in order to fully explore/characterize the performance penalty space. Given this huge parameter space, it's probably impossible to know for sure if each of the settings' performance hit is independent of other settings, but it might be interesting to see if there is an effect for the largest performance penalty settings (i.e. Shadows and Ambient Occlusion).

[@Exigeous]

So yes, you're exactly right that I only changed a single setting at a time as really that's the only way to do something like this without it being hours long. And yes, I absolutely agree there could be compounding issues with multiple features - but since I can't really test for that, save for the preset tests (which is why I added them) I wanted to demonstrate first what each setting really effects then second the _general_ performance difference between those. So when I say something like "Ultra shadows cost us 13% over low" that's all I mean, when I ran that test multiple times in low and compared to ultra that's the difference in framerate I got on my machine. Will that translate to everyone, absolutely no but is it a rough guide to let us know what is and isn't a big performance impact, in general yes. And you just nailed it that yeah, there would be millions of combinations that are impossible to test. The primary goal was "hey, I wonder what this setting does and what the performance impact would be like" that way you can make more informed decisions about what settings to run based on your hardware. Really simply put that's the goal. Make sense?

[@HudsonPeter]

@@Exigeous I absolutely agree, and that's something I should have mentioned in my first comment (sorry about that). Perhaps the biggest value of this video is what each setting actually does, and where you'll actually notice it. Are you going to turn this into an article for EDtutorials.com? I ask just because having google index the text would be great for people (like me in the past) who try asking Google "what does the X graphics setting do in elite dangerous?"

[@Exigeous]

Yeah, I've been talking with a few of the guys about writing it all out so I'll do something there. At a minimum I'll post the video and my script and will see about making a full article out of it - in a few days or weeks as I've had exactly enough of this topic for a while ;-)

[@T1Jafo]

Great content and explanations. A lot of useful information. Your hard work has proven itself once again. (Although it might not seem like it to the viewers, this has to be one your longest production videos. )

[@Exigeous]

Not only my longest but I think it's roughly _3 times_ longer than my next longest video!

[@jaysonjota]

Man! This is a beast video just amazing thank you for taking your time to help us

[@dabruuzer]

Fantastic, and greatly helpful, video. I am a returning player (last played in 2016) and am now relegated to a laptop with only a 1050 in it (at least it has an i7, SSD and 16GB of DDR4), but playing on an attached 27" 1080p monitor. It runs very well, surprisingly, now that I have tuned it based on your recommendations. Subscribed!

[@jgp9260]

Your hard work putting this together, including editing, is highly appreciated. Thank you.

[@ilanshemes1562]

Dude! I can't believe you posted this video today! I installed Elite Dangerous last night on a laptop so I can play while not at home, but I was having frame rate problems and the graphics settings page looked overwhelming. And here you are with this video. Bravo! Thank you!

[@Exigeous]

Whew, good, I really was trying to get it out in time for just you, glad that worked out! :D

[@Pupixario]

Many times I came back to this video. Recently, built a new PC and revisited it. Just want to thank you once again for it and all the hard work you put in to it!

[@AstroKing9619]

The amount of work put into this is awesome, you’re a blessing CMDR o7

[@C0T0HA]

Thank you for this! I did however turn FX back to high because it affects the fog inside the stations, without which they look a bit dull

[@Monody512]

Something worth noting about bloom is that it doesn't scale properly with display resolution, so at higher resolutions you get less bloom. You can see this easily by taking a high-res screenshot with Alt+F10.

[@tsilb]

This man understands A-B testing. This man understands the details people need to see. Every setting should have an animated mouseover thumbnail that displays the differences in-engine. And this should be the case in every game. Great work CMDR. o7

[@Exigeous]

Couldn't agree more, especially about games showing you this in-game. As for the other two I try, I do try.

[@ThatBonsaipanda]

Slight correction to Ambient Occlusion - it's actually a 2D effect that utilizes the depth buffer to shade hard angles. Scene lighting does not have an effect on the shading. AO saves in texture memory use, as the scene doesn't need a shadowmap (even though many games still render them into assets). Also, LOD blending requires a duplicate texture buffer of the terrain textures, you can see the effect in the GPU memory usage in the video. Anisotropic sampling has no performance difference between the different steps 2, 4, 8, 16 but the real difference comes with Trilinear vs Anisotropic with Anisotropic sampling taking twice the texture memory required (depending on the technique) as the mipmaps are copied to the textures side (256 x 256 texture become 512 x 256 etc).

[@Hyporis71]

One of the most usefull videos for Elite i ever have seen. Comming from console to PC this is really helpfull

[@SmashPhysical]

Thanks for this video!! My graphics under Odyssey were markedly inferior to what I had under Horizons, but thanks to the advice presented here it now looks great!

[@TheAlchemisification]

This is excellent timing. Having just brought a new PC running a 2080 Super and an Acer 27" Raptor I can now really ramp things up. Thank you very much!!!

[@jimr5703]

Now THIS was a useful video. Helped me get the most out of my GPU and retain acceptable visual feedback with solid framerates. Took a little experimenting, but it's been fun! Subscribed.

[@MarkRiker]

If you have a second monitor and enjoy watching videos like this while playing the game and you experience crashes, then i would suggest having any settings that affects texture sizes maximum to high/medium and never to ultra. This is a must if you are running a browser that is using the chromium engine or any hardware video acceleration. Windows don't have any video memory/resources manager and with ultra textures you are bound for driver restarts or general crashes. The closer you are at max video memory the most possible is that the video hardware acceleration will crash the driver/vga (as it also needs video memory to work) and you will experience a video restart or a computer crash.

[@Beypocket]

Watched this on your website, had to come over to like and say thanks for the video. Even on a 1080, tweaking a few of these helped me a bunch when I didn't even think I needed it before I watch.

[@BamaChad-W4CHD]

Man what an amazing video! Big props to you for doing this. This is by far the best ED graphics settings video. We appreciate the time and effort you put in this. It had to be very challenging to say the least.

[@rigjockey67]

Fantastic video !! I'm nerdy enough to find this absolutely interesting!

[@jeromepotier5369]

Well, I never saw a benchmark video with such in depth details ... kudos !!

[@chrisrowland7782]

Amazing video, and much needed! The detail is impeccable and it's a perfect achievement in elite dangerous content creation! Next challenge, editing the graphics configuration file to make elite even more realistic, going beyond what ultra settings do and really benchmarking your rig! Bonus challenge, dive into reshade and how it can be used to really make elite as real as it can possibly look. Hit me up of you want help diving into some of that.

[@Exigeous]

You just nailed the next one in the series - the XML file, Reshade, etc. - everything you can do to make it look even better. Wanted this to be the baseline as it was already crazy long.

[@AdmLancel]

This is something I've been meaning to do for a long time, as I've found my GTX 1070 is sort of on the edge between a compelling VR experience and space sickness, with things like the SRV and stations causing the framerate to drop. I'll be sure to make some adjustments based on your findings, as I'm pretty sure I'm using one or two of those settings with next to no visual impact and yet have a disgusting performance hit. Thanks for all your hard work, Exigeous! It's much appreciated!

[@theopinionatedgamer9847]

I've no idea why i wasn't subscribed already since I've watched your channel before XD but thanks so much for this guide. im trying to play VR on my 2070 super and it struggles really badly.... I never bothered turning down volumetric because i saw no difference. didn't realise it does so much to performance XD. thanks so much dude. I finally subbed

[@rudhvelyn]

GREAT VIDEO! I love when people make highly detailed videos like this it is super easy to understand and can obviously see the difference. Very helpful! Thank you so much! :)

[@chrishills5200]

Watched the whole thing; super helpful! I can't wait to try these settings with my VR system. Thanks for the hard work.

[@marcusseldon9065]

Invaluable information for optimizing Elite Dangerous, o7 cmdr Exigeous

[@gamesinsight3800]

Awesome work! I made notes about what I think could impact my VR the most and will check the performance again now. Very VEEERY good work and helpful. Thank you!!!

[@Cirkaable]

Wow! Great stuff! Thanks for making this!

[@TheNiteNinja19]

Crazy amount of work, good work! Gamers Nexus level of testing here. Thankfully this game isn't very hard to run, with an Oculus Quest 2, Ryzen 7 2700x, RX 5700 xt, you can hit 90 frames a second on ultra, verified with the virtual desktop overlay.

[@WagWaggers]

Epic video!!! I shall be using all this excellent information to tune Elite for my PC. Thanks CMDR o7

[@cmdrablearry3815]

Many thanks for the time and effort you put into this video. I reset the game graphics on my reasonably high end computer using your advice and it's made a genuine difference. Vert much appreciated my good man.

[@tuppers55]

WOW!!!! The detail in this video is amazing, thank you for the effort and your time.

[@Baaddger]

Thank you. Long-time subscriber and PS4 player - but now I have a PC on its way and this video will be an invaluable resource when it arrives! You really do produce the very best practical content for ED; thank you again for all the time and effort you put into helping people like me get the very best out of this game. If it weren't for some of your tutorials, I'm fairly sure I would have rage quit at some point last year! o7 CMDR.

[@majorcoolerman22]

Great video, been running with everything set to max but had some issues with fps dropping massivly in icy asteroid belts and some stations, used your tips and now quite butter smooth with 1050ti and i5-7500.

[@simon-ricardokuhn1713]

When neutron stars and white dwarfs are so mighty that they got their own options in the settings menu.

[@Exigeous]

Which sadly seems to do absolutely nothing ;-)

[@yankunflies]

This is a great vid. Thanks, Commander!

[@Youda00008]

Holy crap, that had to take a lot of time. Now i feel like i should donate you something, just for seeing this video alone.

[@major347]

Awesome 👍 most helpful video on performance impact i have see. Very well done.

[@TheNepharim]

Thank you for a great video and your research, I just started with ED and VR, a really great help👍👍👍

[@daveangel2991]

Thank you very much for all your hard work on this. As I've recently bought a Rift S, I can now make sense of some of the settings, and tweak them accordingly. Cheers!

[@ArjunNalapatonline]

I know this may sound silly. I've learned a lot from your videos in past couple of months since I started playing elite. I was wondering if you could touch upon the social aspects of elite in a video? Squadrons, wings, best ways to meet other players etc. I noticed that I've never run into another player in the entire time I've been playing in open, so I don't know about wings and squadrons is very confusing.

[@Exigeous]

That is absolutely no my list, probably get to it in the next few weeks. If you want help now you're welcome to join our Discord, Level 11, as we have a pretty big player base that are very helpful. Link is in the description.

[@EnricoLicata]

Thanks again very much for your incredible work and accurate analisys of the graphic engine. Following your guide I've been able to crank up the HMD quality to 1.5x without any perceivable loss on texture or effect quality... and I'm still using a GTX 980 TI. Elite on Oculus Rift never looked so good!

[@Exigeous]

Ooh, so you're definitely going to be running at 45 FPS if you're running settings that high. Now some aren't bothered by that as the reprojection tech that Oculus uses is best in industry and the clarity bump of 1.5 does smooth things out a bit - but I can't run that high on a 2080Ti at get 90. Check out fpsVR and you'll see what framerate you're actually getting during play - and hey, if it doesn't bother you awesome.

[@EnricoLicata]

@@Exigeous exactly! The 45fps of the Oculus Rift don't bother me, and the added details are definitely an welcome bonus!

[@Exigeous]

@@EnricoLicata Then totally fair enough - just like to make sure people understand the choices they are making, sorta the whole point of the video.

[@SledgeFox]

Thank you for your time and work you put into this to help us, very much appreciated, thank you very much!

[@eRGo369]

such piece of great work cmdr!! thnx you!

[@Tremeslay]

Amazing work sir. Respect to this piece of art. ♥

[@wellzarak4382]

I really needed this for a long long time. Thank you so much for that, i really appreciate this job.

[@Mauserly]

Thank you for making this video. Low end pc here 😄

[@Star51984]

Great video. And a lot of required! Respect o7

[@DJ70906]

Fantastic guide mate, just what i needed, Thank you, genuinely.

[@nafnist]

This would have saved me alot of time fine-tuning the graphics. Great work.

[@petrusion2827]

I might be wrong, but I am pretty sure that Jet Cone quality is very apparent on stars which have cones that move fast.

[@kwlxxi4813]

Thanks a lot for this video. Much appreciated

[@GaveLJorgensson]

Thanks for all the hard work on this!

[@sunekjeldsen7630]

GREAT video, thank you!

[@o.s.2056]

Great video, very helpful. Thank you very much.

[@JimJamsMusic]

Great video man! Your efforts are very much appreciated!

[@eeka_droid]

Great tuto again CMDR Exigeous, thanks for providing it. I keep my fps locked at 75 due to FreeSync tech in my monitor, but tweaking a few options made it feel even smoother

[@Exigeous]

Uh, I think you're missing something fundamental about FreeSync, the idea isn't to keep it locked, in fact it's quite the opposite. As FreeSync/GSync will dynamically change the refresh rate of your monitor based on what's being produced from your card you would NOT want that to be locked. Now if you're talking about VSync that's a different story, where you would want it locked since VSync can't change dynamically. I too have a FreeSync monitor (FreeSync 2 which supports GSync) so I can have the game run anywhere between say 45 to 144 (or higher) and the dynamic refresh rate will keep me from having screen tear, etc. due to it stay matched. Does that make more sense? As that's hard to sum up in a paragraph go find a video on say Linus Tech Tips about FreeSync/GSync which will explain it much better as it seems you're missing something basic.

[@eeka_droid]

​@@Exigeous Here i am again and thanks to this dumb notification system in KZbin i didn't see your answer earlier. Thank you for the kind explanation on the FreeSync/GSync tech, i really appreciate it. Your video actually helped me fix a few awful jagged lines in Odyssey, it's less awful now thanks to your work. Miss your videos man, i learned a lot in the start of my career with your tutorials!

[@lukeperman7964]

This is the video I've been looking for ...

[@Exigeous]

Whew, good - I was hoping when I made you'd find it :D

[@vvvAVATARvvv]

Thank you very much. That was very helpful.

[@cmdrpausanias2332]

Thanks for putting the background hours in on this video. I will be applying the settings this evening in VR. The one thing I hate most is the gradual rendering of planets as I approach them, and the terrain rendering in as I drive around. There are now some additional graphics settings, have you a video covering those?

[@Jack-Wall]

What an impressive contribution. Sure, player to player milage will vary but as a reference / explanation, this is top drawer. Liked and Sub'd. Thank you!

[@Exigeous]

Glad you see the exact point of the effort. Unless I'd done this spanning difference CPUs and GPUs this is the best I an produce with my single system.

[@eblingus]

After watching that video, I am exhausted! ;-)

[@ScratchedWinter]

This is a great vid thanks for making this

[@exorian4168]

Your effort has earned my sub and like my friend. Take it. Legit might join up due to this. Thank you very much

[@markvman4287]

Great video. Thank you.

[@suliman101]

ED Profiler VR Template + tweaked settings from this video and my game runs great now. Anyone looking for the best VR setup watch this guide. Only experience lag from SRV, drops down to 45fps. 1080ti 8700k

[@nunya3963]

I used your suggestions and can run odyssey on my gtx 970 pretty well! Thank you!

[@sadskytristeciel1439]

MAN, thank you so much for this video. You are the best!!! Take care bros.

[@bladesvlogs4965]

Awesome - thanks!

[@DrSid42]

Great video !

[@DChamp56]

Wow, GREAT job!!! And thank you!

[@steelyatron]

Thanks for your effort.

[@nevy4489]

THIS, thank you exigeous

[@rebelchcrik]

@Exigeous I've set Draw Distance and Terrain Quality to Ultra yet the rocks/biology always pop-up barely 200 meters in front of me, whereas after 200m there is "nothing", terrain seems flat. What do I need to change so I see rocks/bacteria/etc from afar?

[@Hreimr]

Thank you for this :)

[@cmdrbuzz7779]

This is such a great tutorial sir.

[@thatkid11767]

You mentioned recommending a 2080 or better for some of the ultra settings. Im able to run everything on ultra at 4k on a 1070ti. Been doing it for a couple years and it seems to run fine.

[@doommaker4000]

I have a 1060 in a laptop and aside from around stations Ultra can easily keep 1080 @ 60 FPS. And I can even cook on it while super cruising or autodocking

[@Exigeous]

"Seems to run fine" isn't very scientific. Sure, if you're just looking for 30fps that might work, but if you're looking for 60 or really 90+ you're not getting that 'everywhere' - as there is a big difference in sitting outside a station and intense combat. Run the same benchmarks I did and you'll be surprised what you're actually getting (oh and realize that I ran all these tests at 2.0 supersampling which is basically rendering at 4k)

[@thatkid11767]

I'm fairly confident I can hit 60 plus fps, but I'll have to look into it. Appreciate the video and the work you put in CMDR.

[@ΓιώργοςΚ-ε8τ]

Great work! Still applies to Odyssey.

[@jclosadal]

Great Job! TY!

[@camy252camy3]

Would love an updated video for settings as of 2022

[@Aaron_Media]

Well done my dude.

[@TENGILL]

Thank you for your hard work Captain. o7

[@ADeadlierSnake]

No matter what I do, my LOD Blending looks like complete dogshit. Textures literally morphing underneath me, even on Ultra. I've tried every combo of settings I can think of. I've spent well over 24 hours in the last week trying to troubleshoot this. It's making the SRV portion of the game completely unplayable for me.

[@agehall]

Thank you for more motivation to buy an nVidia 3090!

[@Exigeous]

Yep, I'm planning to order one rather soon - I do want to see what Big Navi looks like first though.

[@isaacbarney9931]

if you aren't a fan of smoke trails cluttering space, run fx off! takes them away and leaves a very clean looking thruster burn that is great for pictures without the somewhat nasty looking 2d smoke clouds being rendered right behind them. o7

[@stephanealimi2124]

Thank you !

[@hatherlow]

thank you for this

[@XPlayerNo01]

Do you play in 1080p? I think that information would have been useful at the start of the video.

[@Exigeous]

Fair enough - I guess I assumed since the video I created is in 1080p everyone would realize that. But remember the goal wasn't to show specific framerates at a specific resolution but to show the _differences_ between the framerate cost in percentage for each setting. As such resolution is a bit irrelevant.

[@XPlayerNo01]

@@Exigeous I understand your reasoning behind this and your video was quite useful at that. I don't want to be picky since it's probably the first time you did an analysis like this. You made a few tiny mistakes but the video in general was very helpful. Good work overall.

[@TeddyLindsell]

I really appreciated your efforts here cmdr , it’s above and beyond. Ps can I have your pc, it eats mine 😀

[@Exigeous]

Nom nom nom nom, yummie PC, nom nom nom nom :D

[@thepompiers-official]

Hi, you have forget the "Ultraforcapture" in terrain quality.