Under specced pc performance in VR?

[VR Morgan Grimes]

Okay, so I picked up a Rift during the summer sale and have been playing elite in it ever since, my machine is well under spec but seems to cope well enough for my liking (well, obviously I'd like more but hey ho...), anyway having had a few issues after updating windows to the creators update I've spotted something a bit odd.

I've been under the impression that hitting 45fps and relying on ASW (is that the correct one?) to give me 90fps in the rift is going to be my only option for stations, surfaces and whatever and in the main it has been fine like that, however while trying to check on something tonight I happened to have task manager open and was checking usage (I was actually looking at memory usage regarding how much oculus was using) when I noticed that my GPU (970 GTX 4GB) was only at 50% utilisation.

What gives? I've got memory to spare, CPU is not above 50% either and GPU is at 50% and yet I'm stuck at 45fps? Vsync is off and no frame rate limit is on either, seems like something is amiss! Is it the oculus software limiting it to 45fps because I can't hit 90 and would be somewhere between the two otherwise which would not work for the ASW and re projection malarkey?

 

[TorTorden_VR]

perfectly normal.

to maintain a low latency and high responsiveness needed for true 90fps in VR you really can't reach much more than 85-90% of utilisation so oculus will not disengage ASW until the limiting factor that caused it to engage in the first place has the headroom available to disengage.

And if we just assume you need 50% more to do 90fps and the limit for actually being to reliably to render at 90fps is less than 90% you would need to stay under 40% for a significant enough time to disengage ASW.

Even systems that exceed the recommend specs engage ASW in this game.

 

[VR Morgan Grimes]

That's what I assumed, just wanted confirmation thanks

 

[TorTorden_VR]

I am personally running an i7 4790k and a 1080ti with 16gig of 2400mhz RAM.

I still hit ASW in a myriad of places and I actually don't max out my settings.
For instance I'm running completely without supersampling.
But I do happen to run shadows at ultra.
I find shadows very important for immersion.

There is however a huge difference when I'm winged or there are players in the area that aren't docked.
If I'm alone I can get 90fps even stations mostly but add a few players and especially wingmembers and I can ASW to kick in most places except for empty space.
If I add some npc's on top of that. Well..

I still see my CPU or mobo to be throttling a little so there may be a bit more in the GPU than what I'm getting.

I just can't spend $1500 right now to upgrade.
And to be honest what I got isn't bad by any means.

But FD recommend an i7 CPU for a reason.
Got a decent boost just upgrading from an i5 4670k to the i7. and that was with a 980ti.
without doing that I probably wouldnt be getting half as much out the 1080ti that I am.

 

[Asp Explorer]

VR is it's own beast.

You can have godly specs but dire VR performance, or you can have a potato that does VR right.

Some things that I've noticed fixing some rigs is that some family member has installed a cryptominer, or a completely awful antivirus, or has a broken RAID array, or has achieved such a lovely overclock that the CPU throttles down to under it's base speed.

 

[TorTorden_VR]

VR is it's own beast.

You can have godly specs but dire VR performance, or you can have a potato that does VR right.

I think it's far more likely that people running 970's and CPU hacks on the oculus installer doesn't know what right is and doesn't realise how badly it actually runs.

It's like old posts from the late 90's again.

"Hi I have a 486sx2 and get 300 fps in quake 3, I got them mad overclocking skills brah!"

 

[Viking84]

i7 6700K and a GTX 1080 here, VR High settings, still seeing 45 fps on occasion in stations and coming in to land. Can't turn the HMI Quality up above 1.0 either without reducing FPS everywhere. VR is tough to run! On my 4K screen I get a rock solid 60 fps everywhere on Ultra

That said, the Rift deals with it nicely, no problems with motion sickness even in the lower framerate areas. Might throw in another 1080 next year though for some added power, assuming VR performance scales well with SLI setups.

 

[TorTorden_VR]

i7 6700K and a GTX 1080 here, VR High settings, still seeing 45 fps on occasion in stations and coming in to land. Can't turn the HMI Quality up above 1.0 either without reducing FPS everywhere. VR is tough to run! On my 4K screen I get a rock solid 60 fps everywhere on Ultra

That said, the Rift deals with it nicely, no problems with motion sickness even in the lower framerate areas. Might throw in another 1080 next year though for some added power, assuming VR performance scales well with SLI setups.

VR doesn't support SLI at all.
If you have it, engaging VR will disengage SLI automatically.

Yes I know SLI support exist, but no games actually use it.
Not even Project cars 2 support SLI in VR and that came out about a month ago and would like ED see serious benefits from it.

Wait for volta, we shouldn't be more than a 4-5 months away and it could do for Pascal (1080 etc) what Pascal did for Maxwell (980 etc) in terms of performance.

These are my settings for the 1080ti & i7 4790k, engaging HMD - Q or SS just simply cost too much in responsiveness compared to PQ benefits.
If I play with these settings in solo I pretty much do not engage ASW until I hit really heavily populated NPC instances. But with wingmen or player populated instance I often get ASW kicking in.
Fixed the broken URL.