I've seen many reports of — and experienced myself — truly massive drops in framerate, like to single digit frames-per-second stuttering — upon first exit of ship to on foot at combat zones, starports, installations, etc but also re-entering ship from on-foot mode. The usual advice/blame is that something in the chat interface is inefficiently respamming messages and opening the comms panel to toggle thru pages will "unblock" it and bring the rate back up to normal. (You'll see a bunch of 'entering ___ chat' system-change messages load up and maybe repeat NPC comments, then it all 'relaxes' into a better framerate.)
I was experiencing this, but then fiddled around with my AMD settings and in-game graphics settings again, and now this annoyance is utterly gone. Wanted to post in case it helps anyone else. I am not 100% sure which setting 'fixed' it, but the night and day difference in performance makes it clear that much of the complaint about issues might just be a weird incompatibility, not (solely) engine's complete inability to render well.
FWIW, I'm on an X570 system with Ryzen 5800X (not X3D) and 7900XTX card. Neither is overclocked but I am running my RAM (64GB) at 3600MHz XPS settings. Monitor is Alienware ultrawide 3840×1600. I'm not a framerate freak – I don't have ambition to holding >100FPS or anything like that (monitor can't, even) so this may not 'help' anyone in that boat, but for sure I don't like sub-50!
AMD Settings that might be involved: [Driver Version 23.11.1]
- Radeon Super Resolution: OFF
- Radeon Anti-Lag: OFF
- Radeon Chill: ON … Min FPS 65, Max FPS 85 (that's monitor refresh rate)
- Radeon Image Sharpening: ON, 50% sharpness
- Radeon Enhanced Sync ("FreeSync"): ON
….in 'Advanced' driver settings, only Surface Format Optimization and OpenGL Triple Buffering are ON (and I know the latter of the 2 can't have anything to do with this…)
In-Game Graphics Settings: [Game is played BORDERLESS WINDOWED at full 3840×1600 resolution.]
- Model Draw Distance: Slider maxed
- Texture Quality: High
- Texture Filter: Aniso 4x
- Directional Shadows: HIGH
- Spot Shadows: Medium
- Bloom: Medium
- Blur: ON
- Anti-Aliasing: SMAA
- Supersampling: Quality (probably doesn't apply since set to screen resolution not below?)
- Upscaling: AMD FSR 1.0 is 'picked' but since it's off at driver, and I'm playing at native rez, think this means it shouldn't be trying to work.
- Ambient Occlusion: HIGH
- ENV Quality: HIGH
- FX Quality: HIGH
- Particle quality: HIGH
- DOF: High
- Material Quality: HIGH
- Galmap: HIGH
- Terrain Quality: ULTRA
- Terrain LOD Blending: HIGH
- Terrain Work: Slider maxed
- Terrain Material Quality: HIGH
- Terrain Sampler Quality: HIGH
- Checkerboard Rendering: OFF
- Jet Cone Quality: HIGH
- Volumetric Effects Quality: HIGH
- FOV: slider middle (about 100 degrees??
Anyway, for what it's worth, I hope this helps someone, potentially. No, I'm not playing with everything on ULTRA by any means, but it is pretty nice looking. There is some line jaggies at hard edges in the hangar, and orbit lines of course. But the one thing that really 'bugs' me as an aliasing is those blue cable spools at surface installations (industrial type I guess?)…when you're a little ways away from them they almost look like a pixelated blue 'screen' of some sort until you get closer.
Now the only frame 'lag' I seem to get is a brief, single stutter when entering/exiting different zones in supercruise (e.g. from 'deep space' or 'trade lane' to 'planet XYZ' or 'moon XYZ-A' locality), and when first opening the galaxy map in a ship with a high range as all the 'you can jump to here' rays populate, after which it renders nice and fast even as I scroll around regardless of zoom level.
