Animations lagging on galaxy map

[Februarius]

Recently returned to playing Horizon after some time and I am experiencing some annoying animations lag on the galaxy map. Star objects animations, ship icons orbiting around planets on planet list, ship destination lines on the map are lagging. Everything else is looking smooth: zooming in and out, scrolling, opening and closing of menues, in game videos, animations on planet management screen etc.

I tried changing video settings, reducing quality, vsync, borderless, fullscreen, nothing helps.

I am still playing on my old laptop, i5, 2.2 GHz, 4GB of RAM. I understand it is a potato, but didn't have this issue earlier.
I am still on win 8.1 as I can't bother to update, and Steam did warn me that the support for 8.1 is over. I also did updated the game with the latest DLC. But one would expect more issue with game performance if above mentioned is somehow related.

At one point I thought that maybe I am imagining this and maybe it is working as intended, then I checked few YT videos and didn't notice this specific issue.

Hopefully someone is still checking these topics and can help.

Regards,
Feb

[Zaimat]

You can try reverting back to the older version of Horizon (pre-2023) and see if the issue is related to the more recent updates or if it's something else with your laptop or windows updates/drivers.

To do so you need to do two things:
1. Disable the DLC (right-click on Horizon in your steam library, click properties, click dlc, uncheck it)
2. Revert the game to version 1.0.2.147 (select betas and in the drop-down version select the 147 version). I don't recommend using other versions.

Games saved with newer versions will not be compatible so make sure not to click continue and use the load menu (if you have old games) or start a new one.

To switch back to the most current version/dlc. Select none in betas drop-down and also select the dlc again by checking the box.

Let me know how it goes.

[Februarius]

Hi Zaimat,

Thanks for your support, unfortunately it did not help.
Any other suggestions?

[Zaimat]

I did look into this further, going back to the original launch version. There hasn't been any changes to the game code with regards to these systems and it performed the same in my tests. Windows 8.1 should not be an issue.

So I think something is causing the PC to run slower than usual if it did run well before. I should point out that very old laptops with integrated graphics (Intel HD 3000/4000) were too slow to begin with so this is not unexpected.

I would try these if you haven't already:
1. Restart the laptop (this will help if the PC has been running for some time and there is memory fragmentation due to many processes/tasks that have been opened or may still be active in the background)
2. Close all other or background unnecessary tasks that can slow down the laptop while running the game
3. Ideally those processes will not automatically start on reboot, so if you can disable them. There are also guides on how to optimize windows for gaming that can further help if you are technically inclined/feel comfortable doing so.