Pixels dummed down?

Glemish · August 2016

Before the last patch the game was more beautiful. The ocean floor has patches of green cookie cutter shapes now, before everything blended well. The coral doesn't have the same pop it once had. Is it just me or are others experiencing and noticing this?

bparkerson04 · August 2016

I think the games look better! They added light bloom. It's possible they may have lowered the textures to compensate for better lighting effects. A dev would have to answer that. I think it looks just as a good though.

Obraxis · August 2016

We are having to tune Xbox for performance reasons. Some things are more costly than others. For instance, Bloom ended up not costing much at all, so was re-enabled. We're going to continue to try and improve performance over time.

bparkerson04 · August 2016

Thanks Obraxis

I really appreciate that you guys interact with the community. I can really see a massive difference in texture quality while on land. Honestly though, I'd rather have 60fps and crappy textures than great textures and crap frame rate. I love this game. It's hands down one of the best games I've ever played.

ANZAC69 · August 2016

Great one Obraxis, I've seen the frame rate and pixel much worse before the patch, but still loving the game and hope it improves in the future...

Glemish · August 2016

I have to say, developers for this game are more active with the community then any other game I've played.

scoutts · August 2016

I noticed on each Patch build the game is very beautiful. But agree with bparkerson04, that I would sacrifice some texturing for increases frame rate. Especially in the SeaMoth. But that doesn't mean we don't see the potential...a lot of work has obviously gone into making amazing environments.

DelmarKane · September 2016

Please! Please, make sure you allow PC players to tweak their settings. The most infuriating problem with games on consoles and on PC, they are tuned for consoles and no options exist for PC players to take advantage of better hardware. Remember, some us us only play Subnautica in VR as well!

DelmarKane · September 2016

Glemish wrote: »

Before the last patch the game was more beautiful. The ocean floor has patches of green cookie cutter shapes now, before everything blended well. The coral doesn't have the same pop it once had. Is it just me or are others experiencing and noticing this?

One thing to note, after updating, my settings reverted the textures to one step below max. Check and see if that is what happened to you. I do agree though, I did see a drop in texture fidelity, even on high.

One thing I did to help my game with the hitching and might help others (but please know, this is no substitute for game optimization!) if you have a lot of excess RAM (16GB+) I use a program called Primocache. Basically, you tell the program how much RAM you want it to use, and it holds them, even after Windows has purged its cache to make room for more stuff. The great thing about this program, is that you get to tell it how much space to use. If you have less than 16GB of RAM, it would be worthless, since you could only safely use 4GB, and from what I can tell Subnautica does very well managing its resources as a 64-bit game.

My rig has 32GB of RAM (I run my work PC as a VM) so I gave Primocache 16GB to do its thing. The first time I load a texture (even off an SSD) I get a bit of hitching. After that, so long as I don't need to reboot, or I don't go across many biomes in a play session, it doesn't happen anymore. When I look at the cache "hit rate" (meaning, how often the game is pulling files from the cache and not the HDD) I've seen it in the high 80%/low 90%. This makes a massive difference in my experience but at the cost of using my RAM.

Now, this isn't for everybody. Its not a technical setup but the more you know, the better your performance will be (allocation unit sizes can make a difference) but the default setup is easy. The downfall is that it adds about 5 seconds to your boot, once you sign into Windows, to dedicate that chunk of memory. The hilarious part, had a friend over one day and showed him that using 32GB of RAM was easy to do while not encoding video or rendering objects.

I don't have any stake with Primocache, just trying to help some fellow gamers who may be looking for a way to squeeze a bit of extra performance out of their rigs. To be honest, I've been using Primocache for games for at least four years or so. To me, it always baffled me why Windows would unload textures/files while you were in a game, if you had the memory to spare. I've been 64 bit since XP 64 (Don't ask, terrible implementation and no drivers) and it always bothered me I couldn't just hold files that the program would need.

If you do get Primocache (there is a trial), set it up as a read-only cache. Heck, if you have a regular spindle hard drive and 16GB of RAM, a USB 3 jumpdrive, and a USB 3 slot, you can setup a 4GB read-only cache with a level 2 cache on the jumpdrive and it will work almost as well (same friend is using this setup).

Now if only there were a way to decompress all of the game's textures and dump them into a RAM disk....

Glemish · September 2016

fyi I'm on Xbox 1, can't turn up graphics.

Pixels dummed down?

Comments