GTX 1080 + Vive = disappointment

I have owned the Vive for 3 weeks before my Oculus Rift CV1 arrived. My GTX 1080 FW (EVGA branded) had arrived the same time. I was running the Vive previously with an Asus 980Ti Matrix 6G B overclocked graphics card.

Regardless of hardware, the Vive is affected by a antialiasing rendering bug on Elite. It's been there a while; FDev is supposed to be working on it, but there is no ETA. The Rift does not have this issue. So I have returned my Vive to the manufacturer.

Besides the rendering bug, one important aspect of the current Vive driver/firmware had been very challenging to live with on my system. Nearly every time I had launched SteamVR there were some issues with waking one of both of the base stations, controllers, etc., no matter what I had tried to do to optimize it. It was a pain in the butt, frankly. Once everything was running including Elite it had worked reliably but the fuzzy picture quality was difficult to live with. The 1080 GTX made it a little bit better, smoother but it's nowhere near as good as the quality as the Rift.

BTW, the Rift runtime is remarkably solid. The software works all the time, every time. Launching Oculus Home produces consistent results, no annoying popups or driver issues at all. It's not a fair comparison since the Vive's room-scale functionality is missing from the Rift at this point but I have a really tiny room with absolutely no space for room-scale VR experiences. Elite was the main reason why I invested in VR the first place, so I don't really care about other apps at this time.

YMMV, and I was seriously considering keeping the Vive as well, regardless, but the overall software quality issues made it seem like it's more trouble than it's worth at this time especially with the uncertainty of when the rendering bug will be fixed in Elite.

Maybe whenever the next release comes out, the software will also be more mature and I'll be happy to reconsider owning one at that time. But for now and for Elite the Rift has no equal IMHO.

Hm, my Vive worked out of the box. Smooth installation process and no problems at all so far. SteamVR running stable, hardware working as intended. Apart from the bad graphic quality in ED I'm highly satisfied.
 
I'm running a GTX980Ti and Vive, and its working a treat! Have you tried turning your Supersampeling down to 1x? That works for me. Also as the 1080 is a new card with all new gubbins etc. the drivers will take a while to iron out all the bugs.

I dont think you have wasted your money OP, just wait a few weeks and this will sort itself out.

Settings>graphics>quality>supersampeling - 1 x.

Good Luck mate,
Brian :)
 
I have been playing a lot with ED Vr settings on my Vive + gtx 1080 (OC) + i7. The best visuals is when you turn off AA and set SS for 2.0 , shadow off or low , rest on medium , no bulr and no ambient + green HUD. All texts is sharp and AA issues are gone.
But frame rate is 90 fps only in space , rings and also near planets. At starports or engineers bases frames drops around 45 fps. Thouse settings are playable for me but it should not be done this way..
 
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I'm pretty happy with my 1080 experience so far. The only quibble I have is the edge flicker in VR on the current nVidia drivers. Being able to run high settings (still a long way from Ultra) with supersampling has done remarkable things smoothing out those rough edges.
 
First, id try deleting the gpu work table file (it's an XML I think), its located in the root directory for elite. That should force the game to rebuild shaders and can surprisingly solve many issues.

If the above doesnt work, well, driver crashes definately sounds like an issue with overlooking. I know that particular 1080 is pre OC'd from the factory. Maybe try switching between the various modes on the card, msi have presets for OC/gaming and silent I believe.

Failing that try downloading msi afterburner and drop your memory speed by 25MHz or so and give that a try.

As for trying to push up memory usage, land on a few different planet types, visit a few stations... after about an hour of play at 4k (no vr for me), Elite on my system was using 6.6gb of video memory, jumping between planet types (ice/rocky etc) seems especially memory hungry.

*edit* forgot to ask, does elite crash of you're playing on a monitor? Could help to narrow down the problem to something VR specific if it's only crashing with vive.

Jon, thanks for some great insight! Trying it out on my 4k TV was a great idea. Played for like an hour at 4k resolution ultra settings 1.5x supersampling (1.5x on 4k!!) GPU was taxed, but still produced 50+ FPS. No crashes, fan never went above 60%.

I guess the next thing I'll try is some serious runtime on another vive game. If that doesn't cause problems I'll try deleting the XML you suggested.

I already tried a bit of underclocking, but I don't think I underclocked the memory. I'll try that too.
 
Yeah I cry also. I just sold my 980 for a 1080 and I could not touch those settings without judder let alone 90FPS.
I agree. The only way a 970 is running at 90fps with no dropped frames is if you're dropping enough frames in your brain that you can't notice the frame drops. What drugs are you taking? I'd like to try them
 
Sounds like poorly designed or buggy computers simply blaming a video card is simplistic at best, I,ve seen amazing performance from 970,s when there part of a perfectly optimized computer. Some of these posts amaze me -how dare you get good results from your 970,s- grow up you lot.
 
Sounds like poorly designed or buggy computers simply blaming a video card is simplistic at best, I,ve seen amazing performance from 970,s when there part of a perfectly optimized computer. Some of these posts amaze me -how dare you get good results from your 970,s- grow up you lot.

Lmao. Not at all. It is not possible to get that performance from a 970, it's as simple as that. No one is being childish, people as merely pointing out that it's a bold face lie.

You say it isn't? Fine we would all love to be proven wrong and I'm sure someone with that configuration and alleged 90fps would be more than happy to provide a video so that this conversation can be put to bed. If it's true it'll save me a shed load of money.!!

After all kids love videos..... Joking.
 
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Sounds like poorly designed or buggy computers simply blaming a video card is simplistic at best, I,ve seen amazing performance from 970,s when there part of a perfectly optimized computer. Some of these posts amaze me -how dare you get good results from your 970,s- grow up you lot.

What's a "buggy computer"?

You're not going to get "amazing" performance from a 970, you're just not. Well, it depends on what you call amazing, but what I call "amazing" would be performance in line with a quad sli 1080 setup, if such a thing is doable right now.

Anyway. On topic re; driver crashes in ED. This used to be quite a common issue and one that I suffered from a lot on my EVGA GTX 980. Initially I solved the issue by using EVGA Precision to enable k-boost, which forced the card to run at full pelt all the time.

The issue itself was caused by the transitions in demand on the GPU when jumping from system to system and in and out of frameshift. The GPU demand would rise and fall and consequently the GPU would enable and disable the boost clock as required, but as the clock speed was changing, the voltage was lagging behind. This caused the GPU to stop responding and the driver to crash. K-boost alleviated the issue by forcing a constant clock speed and therefore constant voltage.

After some more issues I had in Witcher 3, I did some more investigation and it turns out that there was an updated BIOS available for my card which fixed an issue with the displayport, but also mentioned correcting voltage curves in certain power states. I emailed EVGA and flashed the latest BIOS. I haven't had a single driver crash in any game since, even in ED and I'm not using k-boost any longer.

If your card came with software that allows you to force a constant clock speed and voltage, this might be worth trying. It might also be worth asking the manufacturer if they have an updated BIOS for it.
 
You're not going to get "amazing" performance from a 970, you're just not. Well, it depends on what you call amazing, but what I call "amazing" would be performance in line with a quad sli 1080 setup, if such a thing is doable right now.
Quad SLI is possible. However, put a quad-SLI in a crap system and you'll get crap performance. CPU, Mobo and RAM are just as important as the video card in VR.

If your PC looks something like this, then it's time to upgrade.

latest
 
Sounds like poorly designed or buggy computers simply blaming a video card is simplistic at best, I,ve seen amazing performance from 970,s when there part of a perfectly optimized computer. Some of these posts amaze me -how dare you get good results from your 970,s- grow up you lot.

You clearly dont understand the rendering workload of 2x supersampling in a consumer HMD at 90hz

The 1080 can *just* about handle 1.5x supersampling with VR Low and it packs the equivalent horsepower of 2 x 980s.

I've owned a 970 and it's capable of delivering a solid VR experience but it can't handle supersampling and deliver a consistent 90 fps experience. Not by a long shot.
 
Ive wanted this since i first read Neuromancer back in the 80th... now i got it. Its a beginning, but hey i am glad, that i am around.
If you really want VR, start now. Yes, it is the first step on a long road, but who cares? We finally got cyberspace and we can have it in our living room.

By the way, i have a GTX 970 and an Oculus Rift. Elite runs like a charm with constant 90 fps using 2.0 x oversampling (using the Rifts debug tool and not the Elite settings), everything turned on in medium to high settings and ultra shadows.
No crashes, no judder. I plan to pick up a 1080 within the next 2 months for maximized visual settings. I have no doubt, that the 1080 will deliver, from what i read.

    wish id read this sooner :( Gonna swap my 1080 for a 970 for when my CV1 arrives ( SOON i HOPE ) > wanna swap @?
 
so let me get this straight, even with a 1080 and CV1 people are still struggling to run SS1.5 and all detail on at 90FPS?
damn...

over a year ago i was just able to run it SS1.5 on DK2 75fps on all low settings with 2 x 880m - just. lots of places it dipped.

I was hoping all the latest patches and occy runtime had smoothed things over. geez
 
so let me get this straight, even with a 1080 and CV1 people are still struggling to run SS1.5 and all detail on at 90FPS?
damn...

over a year ago i was just able to run it SS1.5 on DK2 75fps on all low settings with 2 x 880m - just. lots of places it dipped.

I was hoping all the latest patches and occy runtime had smoothed things over. geez

Asynchronous time warp is awesome, the OVR runtime post 1.3 is top notch.

Orientation latency is no longer an issue but in intensive render scenes you still get animation latency even with a 1080.

In my opinion 2x SS will only become possible when Frontier implements the Pascal VR APIs - single pass stereo specifically. Brute horsepower and black magic are enabling high fidelity VR at the moment.
 
I know I'm going against the grain here but I used 2x 780 ti sc's for uhd elite dangerous but had to use a single card for the vive. I was expecting it to be a juddering mess (based on some reviews) but honestly, i loved it. One thing to mention is the ram was nearly always maxed out for vr and uhd.

The pc died 2 weeks ago due to the SSD. I done some investigation but impulsively decided to get a new rig. I'm hoping it'll be even better in vr with a 1080, although some comments make me slightly worried? There again, i know a 780 ti sc was great - so hopefully, things will be better. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Old rig:
Mobo: Asus crosshair v formula
Ram: 32gb DDR3 1866mhz
GPU: EVGA 780 ti sc sli (x2)
CPU: AMD 8 core FX9590 4.7ghz
SSD: Corsair force series 3 256gb(dead now)

New rig: (sorry if any of this is slightly wrong!)
Mobo: msi X99A Raider
Ram: 32gb DDR4 3000mhz
GPU: MSI 1080 8gb Seahawk (water-cooled version)
CPU: Intel Broadwell-E I7 6850k 6 core 4.3ghz
SSD: Samsung 500gb m2 (can't remember model name)

Do you think the new rig is a big step up please? It's set me back a lot of cash :(.

Many thanks,
Evolution
 
It's not a fair comparison since the Vive's room-scale functionality is missing from the Rift at this point but I have a really tiny room with absolutely no space for room-scale VR experiences. Elite was the main reason why I invested in VR the first place, so I don't really care about other apps at this time.
Contrary to what was believed pre-release: the rift works in about the same space as the Vive does. Once the controllers ship with their second sensor, the space it works in will actually be slightly larger than the Vive's.

At present: Rift lacks a chaperone feature; but that could certainly be added in software.

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so let me get this straight, even with a 1080 and CV1 people are still struggling to run SS1.5 and all detail on at 90FPS?
damn...
I guess I need to run FPS benchmarks. I'm running SS2 in VR HIGH and not *noticing* any issues with tracking or frame rate. (CV1, 1080 GTX)
 
I stand corrected.

I had to move SS to 1.6 with VR high and even then I'm seeing sporatic dips into the 80s and even 70s.

I share your disappointment. This massive hardware upgrade hasn't been much of an upgrade so far. Time to sort out over-clocking.
 
I stand corrected.

I had to move SS to 1.6 with VR high and even then I'm seeing sporatic dips into the 80s and even 70s.

I share your disappointment. This massive hardware upgrade hasn't been much of an upgrade so far. Time to sort out over-clocking.

Overclocking didn't help... i can get elite to run well with the 1080 and about 1.6 thru editing the steam vr render file. The in game SS settings dont do anything but lower the framerate drastically with no real visual improvement.
Something in the games coding or whatever is preventing the vive from running smoothly. I can get 90fps thru various adjustments, but it continues to drop frames which are noticeable and annoying.
For now I'll just stick to playing elite in 4k with all settings maxed and never dropping below 58 or 57ish fps

Running:
1080 founders ghetto water cooled
Stable over clock of 2101 for hours on end
I7 6700k
32gb ram
Samsung 850 pro ssd
 
You might be interested in my post talking about how to get the Vive and the Rift crystal clear. :D

Thats what I was trying to say... but i kinda butchered it in my response. But yeah thats the post I've read before and did exactly what it said. But no matter what settings it still seems to miss every other frame.
Maybe i need to reinstall all my vive associated software and redo the room setup...?
 
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