Graphics on Steam Deck

[Sea Witch]

Just came back to the game because it runs on my Steam Deck and it seems... weird. The game auto detects high, no tinkering. Menus are crisp and clear. Head into space and it looks like a confusing mess, like the anti aliasing is non existent. The map is similar, just jagged lines. Am I missing some tweak or is this just the way it is? I display on a 55" HD TV if that has some effect.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

I don't know how Steam Deck works (I know that the game doesn't support it, but if it works - good). Try to check your in game graphics options - make sure that you don't have FSR enabled (it renders everything at a lower resolution, then upscales).

[funkynutz]

The anti aliasing in this game has never worked particularly well.

Things like orbit lines... bright orange against a black background simply doesn't blend very well (I used EDHM to change my orbit lines to dark green, looks a bit smoother).

Transparency can cause problems with it (AA quite often isn't very good in many games when viewed through transparent textures - and there's a lot of transparent textures in Elite).

Multiple high contrast parallel lines viewed from acute angles that makes the edges appear to crawl and jump around.

Then there's the DX11/DX12 thing where AA doesn't render properly in some scenarios...

It's all a bit of a mess really. You can mitigate it somewhat, using SMAA in game, and the GPU control panel to enhance the game setting, using higher super sampling values etc, using blur (something I usually turn off in all games) and bloom hides it a bit - if you don't look too closely. But it's never going to be perfect sadly, and they can have a detrimental effect on performance. It's worth playing around with to find a sweet spot though.

Also if you need to use scaling, use the CAS setting in game instead of FSR. FSR looks awful.

[Sam Willet]

The default for 'High' setting is to set scaling to FSR.

Try swapping that to None.

[Sea Witch]

Thanks for the help. FSR absolutely is garbage. Changed upscaling to normal and bumped super sampling from 1.0 to 1.25 and it looks an order of magnitude better. While FD might not support the Deck, it is now officially verified and it seems to play pretty smooth. Better than the 🥔 I used to play on.

o7

Fly safe commanders.

[Hootman]

Also it's been my experience that gaming on large TV's in many cases will have the tendency to amplify graphics issues and just make things look worse. If you google there is a lot of discussion about it. I'm not an expert on the stuff, some 4K TVs use an unusual subpixel layout or to use a technique called chroma subsampling, which can cause problems with sharpness when displaying fine text or interface elements. This difference isn’t noticeable when sitting far away but becomes more obvious when sitting close.

Basically, if you have one of those really expensive Samsung TV's, it might look fine or even better than a good monitor. But if it's just a sort of run of the mill TV, it might just amplify some things that don't look so great to begin with. As others have noted, ED has always had some poor AA, and the jaggies can be distracting.

As funky says, I use the NVCP to the fullest to smooth out some of the AA issues, along with the orbit lines mod in EDHM to clean those up. Without any fine tuning like that, I can only imagine what the AA / Jaggies looks like on a large TV.

[RingLeader]

Bringing this back from the dead because I can’t seem to find any of the settings that other users have talked about. Just bought elite dangerous, looks terrible on deck. I don’t have settings for fsr or the upscaling. I can turn my fsr down to 0 in my quick menu but it doesn’t help.

[funkynutz]

Originally posted by RingLeader:

Bringing this back from the dead because I can’t seem to find any of the settings that other users have talked about. Just bought elite dangerous, looks terrible on deck. I don’t have settings for fsr or the upscaling. I can turn my fsr down to 0 in my quick menu but it doesn’t help.

It's in the video quality settings. You might need to hit the little "+" icon to see it.

[RingLeader]

Originally posted by funkynutz:

Originally posted by RingLeader:

Bringing this back from the dead because I can’t seem to find any of the settings that other users have talked about. Just bought elite dangerous, looks terrible on deck. I don’t have settings for fsr or the upscaling. I can turn my fsr down to 0 in my quick menu but it doesn’t help.

It's in the video quality settings. You might need to hit the little "+" icon to see it.

I tried to at but there’s no option for fsr or upscaling

[Planewalker]

Some upscalers require SMAA to function. I recommend CAS if your pc can handle it.