Elite: Dangerous players have been complaining that the space sim’s latest major update downgrades the visuals, reducing the quality and sharpness of the game’s textures and dialing down on some of the more demanding environmental effects, like the dust and fog found in ring systems.
Developer Frontier has responded to these accusations (which are handily gathered here), explaining the changes and acknowledging the fact that players want more control, over the way the game looks on their system.
”The team is always striving to make things better,” writes head of rendering Greg Ryder, ”and we’ve found a number of things using the profiling tools on the Mac and Xbox One that have improved the PC build (thus the opposite to the fear they might lower the quality of the PC build). Elite: Dangerous is built to scale on PC (including 16k screenshot ability and hopefully one day 16k game when the monitors & graphics cards exist!).”
”We are certainly not inclined to downgrade the appearance of anything in the game. Exposing more tweakables for an enhanced Ultra is clearly something you guys are passionate about and we’ll see where it can fit in the current roadmap.”
Ryder says that the reduction in the amount of dust and fog was down to a bad case of ”overdraw”, and that attempts to improve performance and visual consistency may have unwittingly lead to a drop in quality.
”I have a number of open issues in our system on the look of the rings, though currently no ETA for when we’ll be addressing them,” he finishes. We’ll keep an eye out for any further developments.
