TESTED: Vulkan, DLSS, Clouds, Render Thread, Water Simulation
Star Citizen 3.23 is in the PTU and I've been performance testing! Vulkan is the big item- comparing it to DX11. There are new reference clouds, upscaling in the form of Nvidia DLSS, AMD FSR and CIG TSR, the new water simulation, entity count changes and a bid improvement in render thread performance!
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Test Setup
Star Citizen Alpha 3.23 PTU
Resolution 4K and 1080p
Main System
CPU: 7800X3D
GPU: RTX 4080
RAM: 32GB 6000MHZ CL36
Minimum Spec System
CPU: i5 10400
GPU: GTX 1660
RAM 16GB 2400MHZ
#StarCitizen #SpaceSim #PCGaming #Squadron42 #S42
I'd love to hear your experience with 3.23- especially Vulkan!
if I was cool enough to try it out I would!
CIG is collecting money from the little guys but building the game for the whales that can afford $2000 PC set up as evidenced by higher and higher entity accounts and the CPU load something needs to be said because this is blatant abuse of the player base while they publish minimum spec stuff that it’s just not realistic at all🤦🏻♂️🤦🏻♂️
CIG needs to be held to account because they are collecting money from the little guy but building the game for the whales that can afford a $2000 PC set up. Higher and higher entity counts and continued double and tripling down on the so-called minimum specs🤦🏻♂️
The last update is better for me with regards to stuttering and the train ride at Lorville wasn't quite as insane. You still have to mind the gap at the spaceport station though!
New "no replication layer" test, kinda explains a lot.
Reference clouds makes a noticeable difference in some areas based on footage I've seen. Probably not worth the performance hit, but I like that they've named it reference.
Yeah it’s basically screencap mode
It is like when you buy a 100k sound system in your home cinema because your 10k atmos setup wasn't enough of a flex.
@@CitizenScottHopefully someday it's usable
They've renamed it photo mode now which makes sense, only for screenshots really until maybe the next gen of high end cards.
@@Bepop-dc4zd Or just better game optimization, upscaling & framegeneration.
Reference setting for clouds would make for some great screenshots. Maybe a good benchmark for the 5090 one day.
Yeah screenshots is a good point actually! I'm not sure even a 6090 will be able to cope!
9090
Honestly reminds me of photo mode in Elite dangerous. It's making the fidelity so fine its not really something you run. You just use it to get tge best capture.
I get 70ish fps when I'm not cpu bound with reference clouds at 3440x1440p with dlss off, with dlss on I go back to being cpu bound around 90ish fps in some areas. Reference clouds are playable, just probably not at 4k
@@Shypa More like GTX 105090 or GTX X5090.
Medium water sim looks pretty good tbh
Yeah I agree- not sure there is much need to go any higher than that.
@@tenpoundfortytwo If you're not flying in third person then there's no point in using it at all.
Reference cloud settings was probably added by the guy who made the cloud shader as a flex setting, not actually intended for use - I know i've done it before lol
That blurry HUD issue has been popping up for a while now. I've noticed it a lot with the Constellation series. Hopefully this issue with DLSS is the push needed to get it fixed. I'm also looking forward to seeing what Vulkan does once they get the multithreading part working and fix some of the bigger issues that they would have found with wider testing. I hope it makes it in this PTU cycle.
Nice, was looking forward to hearing your initial take on the new additions. :)
Oh man I've been waiting for your vid on all the juicy new 3.23 stuff. I need to hop on and do some testing myself and see how it runs ( been busy trying to finish up the Overdrive missions ). Great vid as always!
Thanks for taking the time to do these tests
Good title, straight to the point, no wasted time on explaining the whole update, great video.
Thank you for doing these tests and sharing your observations with us, your time and effort is very much appreciated !
I hope one day CGI adds a self run standardized performance test to the game, so we can just run it and have a reference to help optimize our hardware and software for fps.
Hopefully one day!
thank you for all this testing. this really helps!
You're very welcome!
I really hope they fix the ui bluriness when using upscalers by the time the patch goes live.🤞🏼🤞🏼
I've been waiting for this video! Thank you! I can't wait to see the next one when CIG improves things
Thanks for doing all the testing on our behalf.
thank you for the video. I look forward to getting to play 3.23.
Thx for doing these hardware tests!
Excited, now we just need to optimize
Thank you for testing it all! I can't wait to jump in and see what my 6900xt can manage. Too bad the performance isn't there yet.
32gb 6000mhz ram i7 13700k with a strix 4090. Still runa like ass flakes at 4k.
I dont think the UI blurryness is an issue with DLSS per say, I had this a lot in the Vulture and Buccaneer loaner when it released. would not be surprised if that bug came back considering the blurryness looks identical to what I kept getting
100% ^. I have this same issue without any upscaling. In fact it will come and go in my Sabre by just moving the zoom level back and forth. UI bug, not an upscaling bug IMO.
This is correct, it’s not upscaling related, it’s existed long before 3.23. The quick workaround is to tweak your FOV settings a few degrees
Greatly appreciate your work my friend.... good input
Much appreciated
Can't wait. I test SC after every PC Update with another Account before testing. Even years ago, i5 4690K/FX 8320E + R9 280X and DDR3 said no. Then, RX 6600 came in. No, not with these CPUs. i7 8700+DDR4 (slow bois and only 16GB) came in. GPU and CPU said no for 1080p UW. Now. I am now on Ryzen 7600, 32GB RAM 6000 CL30 and RX 6800 non XT UV+OC on 1440p UW. I hope this will finally work somehow. :D
The blurry flight HUD is a thing I've already encountered a lot of times in the PU, so I don't think the super sampling is to blame here.
Oh yeah we’ve had thT one for long
Correct, this isn’t upscaling related 👍
I play at with 13700k and 4090 at 3440x1440. At hurston, above the clouds, the reference setting had the same FPS as very high at around 60 fps (already CPU limited). So in that scenario with that hardware, the additional option made sense
In the limited testing (5800x3d, 4080 Super, 64 GB RAM, 980 Pro SSD) I did, I also noticed a "small" uptick in FPS with the Vulkan renderer. That being said; the other thing I noticed with Vulkan (and I'm not sure if it just seemed that way), was everything looked a little less blurry / or seemed a little more crisp. I'm not sure if that was real or imaginary, but I think I'm gonna do some OBS recording and look closely.
I also had that feeling. I couldnt' quite tell if i had more fps though, I only tried area 18 so far.
The way DLSS works (and probably other scalers) usually ignores UI elements so the rendering team have some piping work to do in order to help the UI elements being rendered at native resolution again.
5:31 The fact that Vulkan is optional heavily suggests that the game can also run on DX12, which means it would be compatible with Xbox, considering Xbox‘s more open future
thank you for your video. I want to now wich software you are using to mesure the minimal fps ?
CapframeX!
Excellent review. Can't wait to see this come down the pipe
Man I have been waiting for you to upload this video lol.
Hi, great videos! Im doing a pc build specifically for star citizen, do you think i could use the ryzen 7 8700g at 1080p with the clouds off. Using really fast ddr5 and lots of it? Tia.
A very good question! I've not tested it, so can't really say. From what I can see I might struggle at 1080p- you might need to drop to 720p. Any reason you're not getting a cheap dedicated GPU?
Strange, I wasn't aware of these performance issues before Vulcan was introduce - I believe that was only this week. I do wonder if the Gen12 changes to support perhaps Vulkan but of course also feed Direct11 are the real reason for the stutters. Certainly if this was a problem prior to the Vulkan update patch, then I'm sure we would have heard more about it. It was widely known that the Vulkan update was introducing performance problems and they are trying to get closer to the DX11 performance which they are quite clearly not there yet. Once this is achieved, they then can open up the taps to harness the CPU threading capabilities to the render pipelines which should see Vulkan and the Gen12 renderer perform much better.
Great stuff, man! Thanks for sharing with us! I also hope CIG doesn't rush things to the PU, 3.23 is such a massive improvement that it's worth the wait.
Your performance tests are really valuable and interesting, thanks for doing them! Quick q, I run at 1440p on a 3800x and 3070, 32GB DDR4, if I wanted to get a noticable increase in SC's performance, should I be looking at jumping to a 5800X3D? Or do both CPU and GPU really want a boot?
Sorry only just saw this! 3070 should be good at 1440p (especially with the new upscaling options). A 5800X3D would be a noticeable upgrade vs the 3800X- it's either that or a whole new MB, RAM etc for 7800X3D!
@tenpoundfortytwo Thanks for the advice, just one last point, you reckon an X3D upgrade would still have an impact, despite (according to nvidia's overlay) my GPU is often at 100% util whilst the CPU tends to sit around 40/50%?
@@cytokynesys I should help in the cities, and just in general with the 1%lows but you could also use some upscaling to get some more GPU headroom.
Thanks for all the work 👍👍👍
Ive been waiting for this video since w1 opened and vulkan came out!
Using Orison as the benchmark for viewing 'reference' clouds is probably the worst zone due to the color palette. Microtech is a much better example to experience the visual difference, imo :)
WOOO, ive been waiting for this vid!
Yeah this 3.23 patch has reminded me so much of 3.18 because I have been trapped at NB on microteach because elevators don't work. Or can't get off the train because its spinning off into the nowhere. And the 2 times I did get to my ship the ship exploded in the hangar. I'm holding off on EPTU and waiting for it to go to live. Its just to frustrating to test right now.
Let’s go! Another patch from cig that took a long time to get here and made hardly any noticeable changes. 🔥
Also an important point is that multithreaded performance is off so we aren't seeing true parity yet when it comes to parallel computing. The bug fixing is the focus right now. Then they'll implement multi threading support. Which is where the big gains are going to come from.
Could an optimized Vulkan (multi-threading) make the 7950x3d perform better than the 7800x3d in star cit?
It's a good question! Currently the 7800x3d isn't really close to being maxed out on all cores, but we'll have to see what the full version of vulkan does. I'll definitely be doing some testing to see how many cores SC will use!
I can foresee multiple testing videos with all the 3.23 new features
I don't know why so many people say that reference clouds / photo mode doesn't change anything... The clouds looks way sharper and don't have the pixelated effect anymore compared to very high. Performance hit is still way too hard with that and I prefer it on very high.
Hello, Thanks for sharing ! I advice you to take "more" and différent shot of the cloud. POV too. Think like a photographer, not a technical guy only. You can compare sunset, différent meteo, différent planet, you will have "noticable change 👍 Lightning give life tona picture. (3d infographist talking 🥳)
Yep I completely missed the fact that reference clouds will be great for screenshots!
For me the MOBI UI was not sharp when I used upscaling 2k to 4k. That was a few days ago before Vulcan was in settings. I’ve switched to my 1080P monitor now though. I’ve got a 5600x 32 Ram and a 3060 12GB which runs the game great in general.
2:30 this book has nothing to do with upscaling. It's pretty much completely random and I've been getting it for the last 2 years that I've been playing the game. If you move your character's head so that you are not looking straight ahead the hood will clear up. I have no idea what causes this
That's very interesting to hear! It was only an issue for me with upscaling, but I'll take another look- thanks!
@@tenpoundfortytwohe is correct, this is a bug with texture loading and old ship hud elements using Flash still. You can temp fix it by adjusting FOV settings
By the time the game is released I'm sure the RTX 8080 will run the reference clouds just fine
High hopes for CIG, seems they are actively pushing for some solid improvements and content to go along with the updates (in theory). Hope 3.23 comes when it's ready and somewhat smoothed out. Can't wait!
2:40 I think these menus are rendered live as a seperate texture and then displayed in game, I assume that the upscaling setting is erroneously setting the render scale of those textures lower as well.
The thing I just realised about the water effects, after planting my ship into the briny like you did, is that it is only for other people to see. As the player it is nigh on impossible to see and appreciate.
Reference settings are kinda what they sound like, a reference, you spend time getting it to look or act how you want, then you spend time optimizing and giving multiple options and choices, but you want to be able to refer back to your initial reference after you spent a week faffing with it to make it run faster to check you haven't just ruined it in the process, I would assume it's not actually intended for use or production release.
well fuck here's to hoping there's a ton more optimization to be done at landing zones because under 50fps on that kind of system makes me a sad panda. water simulation makes up for it nearly 100%, that is awesome
i have a i5 8400 and it performes ok in live hopefully threading improves it later.
with vulkan and FSR 3.1 frame generation could be possible.
I'm excited for dlss because now I can us nvidias DLDSR to go up to 4k( I usually go to 3k ) on my 1440p monitor and use dlss to upscale. I get about the same performance for a much crispier image.
Looking forward to seeing a comparison video hopefully they fix it all I do worry they will rush it, since Invictus is close but lets hope
Oooo would love to see some CPU bound testing with the new upscaling. Whats the new min spec CPU? Of course after the updater is stable -ish. Love the vids still.
I have been waiting for this! Consensus from other testers on here seems to be a slight performance increase in Vulkan. Which is a nice surprise given that they haven't touched performance stuff (just focusing on feature parity). I want to see them really push things in terms of performance. Better clouds is always nice. Eventually we can brute force some of this stuff years down the line. I plan on playing these gamesfor many years after release.
what the heck did I do wrong. I saw no improvements when I launched into the EPTU. The clouds still looked like how they use to and I was still getting 25fps just like before I upgraded to the latests and tried out vulkan. Neither the CPU or GPU were at 100% usage.
Ref clouds were added for one simple reason. It's the replacement for the Crysis benchmark.
I've been relying on dlss at ultrawide on a 3080ti so hoping for decent frames now
i have these UI issues everytime in live when flying the MSR or any other crusader Ship as soon as i use headtracking for a while - so i don't think that this is actually an upscaling specific issue
great video! you could test Lossless Scaling Upscaling to see if the blurry UI goes away with nvidia algorithm, but i suspect is a game problem not related to dlss
Good idea- I'll add it to the list for when 3.23 is live!
Clouds get funny artifacting when using DLSS in other games maybe the higher quality reference clouds with DLSS on solves that?
Hey, planetary weather got a performance pass also. Been waiting for somebody to show this :) Hint hint.
I think you were looking at the wrong kind of clouds to notice the quality difference from reference. Those clouds were indistinct period. You needed to look at fluffier clouds. It definitely looks better and may ultimately be okay for high end cards using upscaling and frame gen.
Hoping my 3060ti×5600x3d will still hold up when all is said and done lol. Still really looking forward to this patch dropping live, cheers homii and thanks for the testing 🍻
I have similar specs, getting 70fps inside Seraph, 60+ in qt, 40+ in Orison. 1080p with DLSS on Auto. This is the worst it’ll ever be, so even better times ahead.
Refference, sounds like dev mode, and IDk, for screenshots maybe. Doesn't meant to be played with, just by the name of it.
My ship hud does that weird messy thing from 2:30 right now on live lmao
Interesting!
@@tenpoundfortytwo happens if I've been using the mobiglas in pilot seat. Really weird. May not be directly tied to upscaling at the core issue causing it but it's definitely exacerbated by its use from the feedback I've seen on 3.23, far more prevalent.
It’s been happing since 3.20, at least for me. It’s not an upscaling issue, it’s probably just a UI issue.
In the connie its awfull
This "getting blurry" thing isn't a DLSS problem. I already have it sometimes in 3.22 but it disappears after a few seconds and the picture gets sharp again
on a 5ghz cpu and 3090 I have never seen a single fps difference between max and min settings, I would be happy if the settings just started making a difference of any kind
Please! repeat this test again in 3.23 LIVE ! I just wait this launch to buy a new PC for game in 2k
Small mistake: CIG wrote in the monthly report that Vulkan reduces load on the CPU and specifically said that the load on the gpu stays the same. Cool video 👍, that deserved an Sub👍
i have a rtx 3070 and a ryzen 7 5800x and 32gb ram. i get 15fps when i fly down to microtech ground level... even with vulkan and dlss quality. changes nothing for me. 3.22 i had over 100fps nearly everywhere
It's a massive pain in the arse this latest patch, lots of hitching - even in space.. on sunday before the vulcan patch i came across a American server that was running at 30fps server frames, it was crazy smooth
Mercy.... Clouds are insane
Thank you
I realy hope the activate the multi threading sooner than later.
This is exactly why I hate upscaling techniques in modern games. We are scaling up the viewport here, so everything including UI and text elements are rendered at a lower resolution and then scaled up. This is a band aid solution, the UI and everything that is important to the user should be rendered separately and composited on-top of the viewport of the game! Things like for example text will look horrible when upscaled, simply because you lose pixel precision!
EPTZ/PTU i have 20 less frames wich dropes me from 40avr to 20 frames. I5 12600k - 3070 8gb.
I got a Ryz5 5600X unlocked at 4.7Ghz boost when needed that said with a RStrix 4070Ti OC Edition with 12GB 192-bit GDDR6X I am definately cpu limited! (I plan to upgrade to am5 cpu's and motherboards when the next come out but until then) I wonder If I will struggle and if Vulkan and DLSS will help me with my lobsided build!
Please make a Ryzen 7 7800X3D vs i7 13700K comparaison with Vulkan when multi-threading will be enabled. Multi-threading will possibly change everything as the 7800X3D has 8c/16t and the 13700k has 12c/24t
The flight hud going low res is in game now, has been for a while, no idea what causes it. I'm assuming it's unrelated to upscaling just the game being as buggy as ever. Well, the hud in general needs a lot of updating, and fixing, no idea when or if they'll ever get around to it.
How does one get access to the PTU?
Submitting good bug reports in the issue council and confirming bug reports with good evidence.
I dropped from 61 to 37 fps using vulkan..are you sure about your results? 7800x3d, 6900xt, 32gb ram, LATEST DRIVER D3D11 in hab corridor 61fps/270watt draw/99% gpu util(averages) VULKAN (SAME LOCATION, SAME SETTINGS OTHER THAN RENDERER) 37 FPS/225 watt draw/98% gu util(averages) Also for many players the HUD UI DOESNT WORK ON VULKAN (conifirmed on IC)
I'm definitely not sure, but until the other performance issues get sorted out it's pretty hard to tell! But I did just hear about an issue with the latest amd driver, so I wonder if that could be affecting you.
As a AMD user i'll stick to DX11 since i need it to use AMD Fluid Motion Frames and get an average of 150 fps @4k
Nice runthrough. Slightly concerned about turning on Vulkan with single thread reliance.
so basically outside upscaling programs like Magpie are still better than the ingame option at this time
I'm hoping for a may-june release so we can hit the summer with all the new goodies! Have you considered testing SC on linux? The latest Arch/Manjaro is always nice, and the new Ubuntu release is around the corner. It might be worth a shot once the stable is out. It's not uncommon to have 5-10% uplift with linux+vulkan because you can really limit the background processes and laser focus the system on efficient processing.
I cannot get Vulkan to work. Crashes on startup. After yesterday's patch, my performance has been really good.
AMD GPU? Cig has mentioned that the latest driver has an issue.
The blurry text is because the DLSS implementation is not well implemented. Devs can make it so that certain elements are not rendered with DLSS, like UI. Pretty sure CIG will fix.
Wrong, that particular ship blurry UI/hud text is a prior bug that affects some ships and it’s related to texture loading and the FOV settings
@@jwonyoutube I've experienced that bug on the Taurus; but my point still stands. This is different and it's a typical example of a bad DLSS implementation
@@flyingpiglet this bug predates DLSS and has nothing to do with DLSS so saying that DLSS is the cause is 100% false. Stop spreading misinformation.
Clanmate has a 4080 too with a 13700K and 64Gbyte Ram. He has sure less performance but most of the times above 30FPS with refrence clouds (3440*1440 ). Have you deleted the shader folder? xD
For me the client just eats all my RAM. Memory usage is almost double of what it is on Live, because it just takes everything that´s there, which seems to lead to stutters and all kinds of performance issues. Excited for the premise of the patch and at the end of the day it´s not even on PTU yet - it´s on EPTU.
00:00 Intro 00:16 Performance Disclaimer 00:40 Clouds 01:35 Upscaling 03:02 Entity Counts 03:36 Render Thread 04:18 Water Simulation 05:19 Vulkan 06:50 Minimum Spec Test 07:51 Conclusion
Well its called Reference for a reason - I guess that's the target they're aiming for look wise - now they're working on the performance
thankyou for all your testing!!! I'm running a 5800x3d with a 7800 xt and 32 gb 3600 16 ram . SC runs really well even my 5700x3d with a 7600xt 32gb 3200 16 computer runs it almost the same. But i didn't get a 3d chip untill i watched your videos and so glad i upgraded my am4 systems (one day i'll be able to get am5 or am6 :P) Keep up the great work!!! Oh could you do a video on overclocking ram maybe?
Thanks for putting yourself through the tests LOL I hope one day you can say " they have done it 60fps in all the cities and landing sites lol .... Ok I'll wake up soon
One day!
I bet adding reference for clouds is to train dlss.