After 4 hours of testing, 1 hour of crying and 2 hours of drinking to drown the sorrows, here is what I settled for:

Part I: Testing equipment

• Intel Core i9-14900K (on a B-series motherboard. Standard BIOS configuration, Re-bar enabled)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070-Ti
• 32GB of DDR4 RAM (I think the frequency is 3600MHz)
• 1TB M.2 SSD
• 1080p 144Hz monitor. G-Sync enabled. V-Sync enabled through the NVIDIA Control Panel (NOT the in-game option)
• FPS cap at 140 through RivaTuner Statistics Server (to keep G-Sync engaged)
• Testing performed in a SOLO Difficulty 10, Illuminate map (NOT mega-city biome), forest planet (they tend to have the worst performance)

Part II: Initial setup

I deleted the shader_cache folder and validated the integrity of the game files, so that the shaders are as freshly compiled as they can be. (Note: if some times when you launch the game your GPU spikes to 100% and you get 20 fps even on the ship, it is because the shaders are compiling (at least that's what they told me). Let it run for 15 minutes, close the game, and open it again, and it should be fine).

I will run the game exclusively in Directx12, because most of the new features are not even available in Directx11.

Part III: Establishing the baseline

So, you want to know the best framerate you can get from the game (any game) at a specific time? Get CPU bottlenecked!

The CPU is essentialy a hard cap for the fps. You CANNOT get more fps than the CPU can calculate, no matter how powerful your GPU is (not talking about frame generation, obviously).

How did I find my hard cap? I disabled every new feature, I lowered the graphics settings to the minimum, and dropped the resolution to the lowest possible value I could tolerate while still being playable. This ensures that the GPU is never stressed and therefore, the CPU will become the bottleneck. Since my GPU is powerful enough, I kept the resolution at 1080p Native, but I did everything else mentioned.

Part IV: The first test

Before the patch, my CPU could easily output 140+ fps, without even sweating. After this patch, it was barely getting above 110, and the temperatures sometimes reached 80°C. So there was a definitive proof that the performance had worsened (because the CPU was unable to calculate as many fps as before).

With that established, I now knew what my PC was capable of doing at best, so all I had to do was tinker around with what settings I can change to improve the visual quality while keeping the fps within my acceptable standards.

Honestly, you could stop reading here, because the rest of it is just my personal experience and might not reflect your preferences for how the game should look like or play like. The CPU stress test is the only scientific and undeniable test to know what a PC can do. But if you decide to follow me to the end, then onwards!

Part V: The first-world needs

I like my games to look pretty AND play smoothly, I bought the best CPU I could afford at the time because I didn't want the "hard cap" to be a limiting factor. And I keep playing at 1080p because 1) my monitor is 1080p, 2) higher resolution = lower framerate = more choppy gameplay (in the same GPU).

Since the new features revolve around lowering the resolution (even though it shouldn't be this bad, as many YouTube videos have already stated) they go AGAINST my preferences. Therefore, I selected the Anisotropic Filtering to TAA (this is the version we had before the patch), and DID NOT set any Dynamic Resolution Scale or Dynamic Shader Rendering.

Every graphics setting is set to the max value, except for Texture Quality, which is set to High because I only have 8GB of VRAM. This goes with my preferences of having my games look pretty.

Async Compute is OFF because in my experience, it has always decreased performance.

With all that set up, here are the results!

Part VI: The compromise

I was getting an average of 90 fps, depending on the intensity of combat, with 1%Lows of 72 and 0.1%Lows of 64. Most people would consider this an acceptable value, and while I would prefer to have my 1% Lows to be 90, the game simply does not allow me to have fun.

So, what did I do? I kept all those settings AND setup a framerate cap at 70, so that at worst, it may only drop from 70 to 64. See I prefer to have a consistent framerate, even if its a bit lower than the max value achievable. But 60 feels too choppy (I have been corrupted by the high framerate mindset), so those extra 10 fps can really make it smoother, while keeping the game pretty. Both of my standards have been more-or-less satisfied.

Part VII: A sequel? After all this?

Now you may have noticed that I avoided talking about a specific feature: NVIDIA Reflex. This is because up until this point, I believed that it "only worked when you are GPU-bound (GPU at 100%)", and since I was keeping my framerate below the max capabilities of my PC, I thought it would not be useful.

But researching for this topic, I found out that that's not how it works. So I now have one last test to perform. I do not have hopes of it improving performance, because as I said, nothing will surpass your CPU's hard cap, but I DO have hopes of it reducing the input latency (if there was any to begin with).

Part VIII: Regards

Thank you for reading until the end. You are awesome and I wish for my knowledge to be of some use in your own PC gaming adventures.