Odyssey VR Performance Discussion

[epoch5]

all i can say is, post your exact settings and your specs with vr headset, as well as any tools used (does openXR work yet in ED?) as well as a few screenshots of you running around bases and flying at other hot spots at 90fps..... and then never ever change your drivers or your settings because you have clearly found the sweetspot. buy maybe there is a specific setting you have turned on, either in game or out of game in windows which is skipping around a problem in elites coding?

i am not calling you a liar at all so please dont see it that way, but having fiddled a fair bit (but not with open XR recently it must be said) but i think it is a subjectivity thing and you are either not noticing reprojection artifacts or you are not minding frame drops or have another setting dialed back..... which is great.... but for those of use who do, they stand out like a sore thumb, esp like for me when i went back to ED:H where everything is noticably better performing (but perhaps not quite as pretty)

I will try to put together the settings but I 'll tell you right now I pay no attention to FPS and you are never going to get 90 out of ODY, if that is your goal you are struggleing for the unobtainable. The game plays smooth as glass for me. And that's all i care about but I will put together in game settings and some others. here is my system. Rx 6800XT, ryzen 5900X, 32 GB mem., 4 TB ssd space, The computer runs in 4K all the time. I will try to give you the head set setting and in game soon. It is my contention that players here pay way to much attention to FPS when they should be looking at their system, internet providers or for that matter trying to squeeze great performance out of a cheap head set is counter productive.

 

[jojon]

...It is my contention that players here pay way to much attention to FPS...

No - what looking at the frame rate does, is confirm and explain the imperfections one have already seen with one's own eyes.

If either stuttering/ghosting, or reprojection artefacts truly appear to you as "smooth as glass", more power to you, but others may have higher standards.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

I will try to put together the settings but I 'll tell you right now I pay no attention to FPS and you are never going to get 90 out of ODY, if that is your goal you are struggleing for the unobtainable. The game plays smooth as glass for me. And that's all i care about but I will put together in game settings and some others. here is my system. Rx 6800XT, ryzen 5900X, 32 GB mem., 4 TB ssd space, The computer runs in 4K all the time. I will try to give you the head set setting and in game soon. It is my contention that players here pay way to much attention to FPS when they should be looking at their system, internet providers or for that matter trying to squeeze great performance out of a cheap head set is counter productive.

Thanks for your reply . as suspected then it is your tolerence for a lower framerate... which is great but it isnt what i would call smooth as glass as i do notice dropped frames and reprojection if not matching the native refresh of my panel.... oculus ASW 2.0 is amazing and i can live with that but 1) it does not support my G2 and 2) ED does not support it unfortunately.

no biggie however but it stops me messing around thinking i am doing something wrong.

it is why however actual frame rates or frame times are so important because smooth to one person is nausea causing to another.... either way happy VRing cmdr.

 

[Darkfyre99]

I’ve been experimenting with my settings, and in my case, the biggest performance hit I get is when I scale up my resolution in game, as a work around EDO’s native anti-aliasing. As I understand it, EDO’s AA software based, rather than hardware, so that really isn't surprising that doubling my resolution, for example, also doubles the workload on the CPU. The second biggest performance hit I get is when I turned Supersampling on in EDO’s settings. I'd forgotten I'd actually turned it off way back when, because it really wasn't providing a noticeable visual boost IMO.

IIRC, a few years ago, there was this whole “supersize your resolution” thing. At the time, my old computer didn’t have enough power to go this route, so I never bothered using it. I did the same with my new computer. It wasn’t until I activated EDO’s native AA and/or supersampling, and then entered concourses or settlements, that there was a noticeable performance drop. Especially at on-foot combat zones.

I suspect that the on-foot AI is using CPU cycles for pathfinding and other advanced behavior, which in Horizons wasn’t really a thing. (Skimmers vs SRVs anyone?). In Horizons, those free cycles were available to perform an additional AA/Supersample pass, independent of the GPU. At the end of my experimentation, I made sure that AA/Supersampling was off under EDO’s settings, and found hardware settings I’m happy with.

I just wish this was an option:

NVIDIA VRSS, a Zero-Effort Way to Improve Your VR Image Quality | NVIDIA Technical Blog

The Virtual Reality (VR) industry is in the midst of a new hardware cycle – higher resolution headsets and better optics being the key focus points for the device manufacturers.

developer.nvidia.com

 

[epoch5]

Thanks for your reply . as suspected then it is your tolerence for a lower framerate... which is great but it isnt what i would call smooth as glass as i do notice dropped frames and reprojection if not matching the native refresh of my panel.... oculus ASW 2.0 is amazing and i can live with that but 1) it does not support my G2 and 2) ED does not support it unfortunately.

no biggie however but it stops me messing around thinking i am doing something wrong.

it is why however actual frame rates or frame times are so important because smooth to one person is nausea causing to another.... either way happy VRing cmdr.

Sorry to have to reiterate this but my game play is smoth as glass. Your fixation on 90 FPS is your downfall not mine.

 

[jojon]

I just wish this was an option:

Yes, nothing MSAA-related will indeed probably ever be made to work with a deferred renderer... :/

I am a bit lost about what this "Odyssey native AA" is, which you speak of..? -I have only seen the same post-processing AA options as Horizons (SMAA and FXAA; I'm inclined to presume these run on the GPU, and not the CPU, by the way).

...or do you mean DSR FSR? (...which is not AA, but running the game at lower resolution and scaling the result up in post, only using a slightly less "naive" algorithm than usual.)

 

[Darkfyre99]

Yes, nothing MSAA-related will indeed probably ever be made to work with a deferred renderer... :/

I am a bit lost about what this "Odyssey native AA" is, which you speak of..? -I have only seen the same post-processing AA options as Horizons (SMAA and FXAA; I'm inclined to presume these run on the GPU, and not the CPU, by the way).

...or do you mean DSR? (...which is not AA, but running the game at lower resolution and scaling the result up in post, only using a slightly less "naive" algorithm than usual.)

I’m under the impression that the AA options on the graphics settings in Odyssey are CPU based, based on what I’ve been reading online. The GPU based AA options seem to be conspicuously missing. Of course, I’ve never bothered to do a deep dive into this kind of thing before, so...

 

[BigBANGtheory [VR]]

Thanks for your reply . as suspected then it is your tolerence for a lower framerate... which is great but it isnt what i would call smooth as glass as i do notice dropped frames and reprojection if not matching the native refresh of my panel.... oculus ASW 2.0 is amazing and i can live with that but 1) it does not support my G2 and 2) ED does not support it unfortunately.

no biggie however but it stops me messing around thinking i am doing something wrong.

it is why however actual frame rates or frame times are so important because smooth to one person is nausea causing to another.... either way happy VRing cmdr.

Yup exactly, and its not one person vs. another you have the likes of Sony, Valve and Oculus that have studied the effects and whether you like it or not, whether you agree with it or not the answer they landed on was 90fps for the base line.

I can tell within seconds if I dip into reprojection 45fps, I can tolerate it but I don't like it.

Anyone that claims less than 90fps is smooth as glass is really saying 'according to me its smooth by my definition and that's all that matters, I don't care what anyone else thinks' pointless arguing down to that level tbh.

 

[JR250]

Hi all.

I use FPS to measure performance across different settings, drivers, and ED versions. It's a consistent scale of reference across all of these.

I ran at 36 FPS for months (72 FPS in settings, reprojected) so I don't necessarily shoot for higher frame rates. However, I know it's performing better when I get better visual quality at higher frame rates. With that in mind, Horizons renders more frames per second, and loads the GPU less than Odyssey, at similar visual quality.

oculus ASW 2.0 is amazing and i can live with that

I gained significant rendering headroom by disabling ASW in the Oculus app. It's counterintuitive but having ED do more at higher settings, makes it perform better - somehow. I went from barely being able to render 36 FPS to running at the native 72 FPS and having sufficient headroom to possibly render at 90 fps. As I said, I'm not obsessing about FPS so 72 works for me and that's where I left it.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Sorry to have to reiterate this but my game play is smoth as glass. Your fixation on 90 FPS is your downfall not mine.

and subjective definitions of what is smooth is not really useful as objective ones.

some people can play racing games at 30FPS. I can't, it makes me feel ill and fing the controls unresponsive. it is not an obsession not wanting to feel sick!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

Hi all.

I use FPS to measure performance across different settings, drivers, and ED versions. It's a consistent scale of reference across all of these.

I ran at 36 FPS for months (72 FPS in settings, reprojected) so I don't necessarily shoot for higher frame rates. However, I know it's performing better when I get better visual quality at higher frame rates. With that in mind, Horizons renders more frames per second, and loads the GPU less than Odyssey, at similar visual quality.



I gained significant rendering headroom by disabling ASW in the Oculus app. It's counterintuitive but having ED do more at higher settings, makes it perform better - somehow. I went from barely being able to render 36 FPS to running at the native 72 FPS and having sufficient headroom to possibly render at 90 fps. As I said, I'm not obsessing about FPS so 72 works for me and that's where I left it.

unfortunately elite only supports ASW 1.0 but sure what ever works for you. I have reprojection (a poor relation to ASW) set to auto but set my settings to only use it occasionally.

i cut my teeth in elite in VR with a 670gtx and DK2 running at 75hz. I could tolerate it but upgrading to a gtx 980 with a CV1 at 90hz was night and day

 

[jojon]

...
Of course, I’ve never bothered to do a deep dive into this kind of thing before, so...

Well, as long as the developers know, it does not matter how little we know. :7

 

[epoch5]

After looking at all the post here it seems to me that the people that are having problems are running Oculus head sets. Just food for thought.

 

[jojon]

On the contrary: It is usually some particularly vocal Oculus users who claim to have zero problems, but ultimately tend to prove to simply be subjectively ok with reduced resolution, and/or with frame synthesis. (I'm on a Valve Index, by the way.)

Look... As long as any ASW or similar is off, I am perfectly able to play even with frame rates that dip into single digits, and I do this, with zero game-breaking "problems" - I have acquired the stomach and accustomisation, but I am not going to pretend that is just as good as matching the refresh rate of the HMD, or that it is in any way smooth.

If I cruise high above the surface of a planet, so that the ground below crawls past by a fraction of a pixel from one frame to the next, or even drive the SRV with my gaze locked on the vanishing point straight ahead of me, so that I see a likewise minimal (radial) optical flow at the tiny end of my tunnel vision: Then yes - it is going to look smooth enough, but as soon as frame deltas become just the tiniest bit greater, the multiple refreshes using the same frame (albeit panned to account for head-turning) turns the whole world into stop-motion animation -- worse than stop motion animation, because my visual cortex, knowing that I am in motion in the virtual world, expects there to be a contiguous optical flow, and gets thrown off by the constant stops, producing a perception of ghosting and blur - very unnatural, and making it nigh-on impossible to comfortably track anything in the world with my gaze; Spinning out with the SRV halfway makes my vision blank out for the duration of the manouver.
(ASW by any name, meanwhile, is worse yet - turning the world into a wobbly mirage.)

Reducing resolution until the frame rate keeps up, makes motion much more natural -- we are supposed to get a sense of being there, after all, and not being constantly reminded we are looking at a pair of monitors strapped to our faces.

Unfortunately, reduced resolution makes things look significantly less natural on the other end; Undetailed, blurry, shimmery, unstable, unsubstantial... Here's hoping one day we'll find ourselves able to play Elite in VR without having to compromise on either spatial, nor temporal resolution.

 

[Darkfyre99]

Reducing resolution until the frame rate keeps up, makes motion much more natural -- we are supposed to get a sense of being there, after all, and not being constantly reminded we are looking at a pair of monitors strapped to our faces.

Unfortunately, reduced resolution makes things look significantly less natural on the other end; Undetailed, blurry, shimmery, unstable, unsubstantial... Here's hoping one day we'll find ourselves able to play Elite in VR without having to compromise on either spatial, nor temporal resolution.

Out of curiosity, are you using any of the “hidden” graphics settings mentioned in this thread?

I would like to improve graphics even more...

Is there something we can "hack" to improve something in game graphics. Planetary textures, lighting, shadows, anything? I am not saying something is bad.. No.. But... I want maximum deepth! :)

forums.frontier.co.uk

I ask, because I suspect that the main difference between Odyssey and Horizons performance is that in Odyssey, the on foot NPC’s AI is much more CPU demanding, and there’s a lot more of them compared to Horizons, which leaves few resources available for CPU based visual performance. When I got VR originally, I ended up resetting these settings to improve performance, and by the time I built my current machine, I had forgotten that this was even a thing.

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

After looking at all the post here it seems to me that the people that are having problems are running Oculus head sets. Just food for thought.

more likely because they are the dominant headset..... if anything ime elite runs better on oculus headsets (most titles do if designed to run natively) openXR is improving things and closing the gap. not sure if elite can run on openXR or not if it did and if some are running on it it would explain a lot as i am using steamVR . it (openXR) is a gamechanger in MSFS 2020 on my reverb G2.

note i am not having problems with ED:O, and indeed that is my go to version of the game but for me the performance between ED:H and ED:O even on a high end rig the difference in performance is significant, EDH feels more fluid with no reprojection artifacts.

i know yours is as smooth as glass but sadly you are in a minority for not seeing or more importantly feeling the performance difference.

 

[jojon]

Out of curiosity, are you using any of the “hidden” graphics settings mentioned in this thread?

I would like to improve graphics even more...

Is there something we can "hack" to improve something in game graphics. Planetary textures, lighting, shadows, anything? I am not saying something is bad.. No.. But... I want maximum deepth! :)

forums.frontier.co.uk

I ask, because I suspect that the main difference between Odyssey and Horizons performance is that in Odyssey, the on foot NPC’s AI is much more CPU demanding, and there’s a lot more of them compared to Horizons, which leaves few resources available for CPU based visual performance. When I got VR originally, I ended up resetting these settings to improve performance, and by the time I built my current machine, I had forgotten that this was even a thing.

I do, but that is my fully consciously sacrificing frame rate and video RAM for image quality, on purpose. :7

I can confirm, though, that regardless whether I run on high or reduced settings (both render resolution and graphics config tweaks), I do see plenty of wide red, performance-throttling, spikes on the CPU timing graph (...with a i7-8700 CPU @ 3.20GHz); even in empty-ish space, where there are at least no pesky bipeds, but who knows what other tasks may be ticking... :7

Now, those spikes were always there, of course... I have not done any CPU load comparisons between Horizons and Odyssey, but I could easily imagine there being a bit more stuff going on with it in Odyssey, as there is with other things... :7

Not that there is any doubt shaders have been overhauled for the 4.0 client, as evidenced by how much shinier everything is, and how many complaints we have had about paint jobs not looking the way they used to... I read somewhere that all shaders seem to have gained a fair bit of code, and take more parameters than their Horizons counterparts...

 

[epoch5]

Struggle all you want but I am not changing a thing.

 

[DrinkyBird]

I’m under the impression that the AA options on the graphics settings in Odyssey are CPU based, based on what I’ve been reading online. The GPU based AA options seem to be conspicuously missing. Of course, I’ve never bothered to do a deep dive into this kind of thing before, so...

Doing such stuff on the CPU would be horifically slow and just a very unwise idea; anti-aliasing is always implemented as one or more fragment or computer shaders, which run on the GPU. (The exception is multisampling - but that's part of the GPU hardware itself and not a shader.)

 

[Morbad]

Sorry to have to reiterate this but my game play is smoth as glass.

If I put on your headset at your system, I would probably not agree.

I’m under the impression that the AA options on the graphics settings in Odyssey are CPU based, based on what I’ve been reading online. The GPU based AA options seem to be conspicuously missing. Of course, I’ve never bothered to do a deep dive into this kind of thing before, so...

Odyssey's AA options are post-process shaders that run on the GPU. It wouldn't be practical to run anti-aliasing on the CPU; shaders resources would need to be kept in system memory and would have to synchronize with the GPU very frequently, which is very slow.