So, it all began last week when our small gaming group of three decided to jump back into Icarus after nearly a year away. See how the 40 plus updates since then had treated it. Since last playing i had upgraded to a G9 Odyssey 49" screen, and, at a resolution of 5120 x 1440 i was expecting some frame drops, but hoping with some tinkering i could be above 30-40. Oh boy.

Started on Dx11, epic settings with a plan to drop down one by one once in game. 25ish fps, fairly stuttery. Drop a few settings, 25ish. Drop a few more 25ish. Set auto suggest, defaults to minimum, restart game, 25ish. I'm like come on, really. My gear is a bit old but not ancient. Z390f board, 32 gb gskill ddr4, rtx3080, i5 9600k, two x 500gb m.2 for windows 11 and games, two x 870 evo ssd for stuff.

Download latest drivers, start game. 25ish on low. Put to epic 25ish. Try dx12 with rtx on all epic. 22-25ish. Ok. Back to dx11 epic, 25ish. Low, 25ish. Some sort of weird pattern here. Watch a ton of YT vids on settings for the game, nvcpl settings, check all monitors settings, reinstall game on the my second m.2. Jump in, 25ish. Pain. Ddu cleaner, install old drivers, same. It has to be the ginormous resolution killing it surely. I am really suspect on why it is 25ish no matter what i do, but i lock it in my head that the resolution is my solution.

So off to my pc shop i go, i had been putting off grabbing a 34" 3440x1440 screen for work that i wanted as the G9 i wanted to reserve for for fun and not work. Kicking myself in the butt for selling my 34" to a guy at work when i grabbed the G9, but anyway. Picked up a G5 for 430 bucks and headed home. Set it up, you guessed it, 25ish. Pain.

In between all of this i had been on the reddit sub for Icarus, the discord and trolling performance issues in the dev board posts. One guy yesterday mentioned to check afterburner to see if my wattage was turned down. I did have an undervolted profile set from about 6 months ago, not much, but i had not noticed any fps drops in anything else. So i jumped in and there were two profiles, and it was defaulted to the 2 slot..which was a massive downgrade. Wtf. I deleted that one, set it to standard card specs and jumped into Icarus. Dx11, all still low. 165 fps. Epic, 120 plus fps. Dx12 all epic, rtx on, 60-80 fps, looks stunning, plays amazingly. Wow.

I have no idea why i had that second profile, and why it was defaulted to it. Afaik i had been using profile 1 and had had zero issues in any other games since using afterburner. Regardless, i did something stupid in there and had been chasing my tail for a week..and spent $430 i really didn't want to until next month! Atm i am just using the stock card settings and will leave it at that.

Problem solved, thanks to no help from this lump on the chair!