Another convert + some advice sought

[Darkmark07]

Hi all.

Thanks to all evangelising on this forum and my love of this game, I took the plunge and bought a DK2 which arrived on Friday. Before I begin my lengthy cry for help, I'd like to (hopefully) earn some brownie points by saying what a great community there is on this sub-forum. it's great to see so many people taking the time to share knowledge and to help each other out with this amazing technology. Makes such a difference compared to the constant complaining and whining that goes on elsewhere. Great work everyone - hopefully I will also be able to make a positive contribution once I've begged for help!

Much fun over the weekend setting up the DK2 and I've got it so it's playable on my rig, (wow, what an incredible experience!) but, unfortunately, performance is far from stellar.

My rig is a 'bitser' made up with components left over from some old 3D CAD workstations based on a Dell Precision T5400 that I had kicking around, albeit it with a (newly purchased) reasonable GPU:

GPU: GTX970 (MSI Gaming, mildly OC'd)
CPU: 2 x Xeon X5450 (4 cores @ 3GHz)
RAM: 24GB DDR2 5300 ECC & Double-buffered
HDD: Crucial SSD of some description

So some background, I downloaded the 0.5.0.1 SDK and performed the basic setup the rift as per TomF's excellent guide: http://home.comcast.net/~tom_forsyth/blog.wiki.html#[[Elite Dangerous on the Rift]].

Then followed DrKaii's guide (great work) and fiddled around to get some improvements in the overall quality and whilst these showed some promise in terms of everything looking pretty, frame rates were still pretty low (< 40FPS in stations, somewhat better in space). Next up, I followed ShaveIceBaby's guide (again - thanks for sharing) and was blown away in terms of what is achievable for graphics performance in the rift but this made everything horribly jerky and completely unplayable.

So, rather than concentrating on trying to make everything look pretty, my thoughts were to concentrate instead on boosting the framerate to a consistent near 75FPS everywhere and only then start tweaking to improve the visuals.

First step was to get the OSD running from Riva, and to show GPU usage and graphics memory use. Interestingly, GPU % rarely shows over 40%, even in station with head tracking going on, so on the surface it doesn't appear to be that the GPU is running out of juice, also memory is in the region of 1700MB, so nowhere near the limit there either...

Next step was to monitor the CPU cores. Highest utilisation on 1 core was around 80% and a typical value would be about 65%, so whilst the CPU is working reasonable hard it doesn't seem to be the bottleneck.

Anyone have any thoughts here? I downloaded the latest nVidia drivers last night and if they have made a difference, it's quite small. I also set the profile for elitedangerous.exe back to the default so I'm starting from a known config. Changing the detail level in the game from Low to Ultra doesn't have much of an impact, nor does turning off AA / setting shadows to low.

I'm wondering whether I have a hardware bottleneck as both GPU and CPU are rarely maxed (except when running 4x super-sampling with caused the GPU usage to hit 99% and stay there!). My thoughts now turn to the memory. Unfortunately, I'm tied to using that specific RAM type as it is required by the mobo, but it isn't the fastest RAM in the world, and the ECC and double-buffering isn't going to help throughput either. Any thoughts here, or any tools that can help me assess whether the memory is too slow and is causing the bottleneck?

Ultimately, I've got no right to expect that hardware which is pushing 5 years old should be able to run this at all so I'm already preparing myself for some more expense in the future. The question is whether I can push this back by a couple of months because (hopefully) I've done something stupid or missed something obvious. The last thing that I want to do is to spend a significant amount of cash, only to discover that the performance is no better :-(

TL;DR - low FPS on old PC with decent graphics in the rift - could be memory-related but am interested to know if anyone has any other pointers before I shell out on a new rig

Thanks in advance,

Mark

 

[Pate]

Hi, and congrats on joining the DK2 club!

There does not seem to be anything obviously wrong with your setup. I run i7 4770T (2.7GHz nominal, in ED it runs at 3.3Ghz Turbo Boosted), GTX 970 (mildly overclocked, same as yours), and 16GB of RAM. I don't have any major judder problems, I run all the game settings in low-medium range (shadows medium, Blur and Bloom off, etc).

Perhaps the dual processor setup, or the non-standard RAM causes problems, but I would think that those are both somewhat unlikely culprits.

Did you check the actual FPS you reach in DK2? You should have constant 75fps, otherwise problems arise. For example, if for some reason your monitor limits the DK2 to 60Hz, but the game forces V-Sync on, you will probably actually get 37.5fps.

I have three monitors, my primary and secondary both only can run at 60Hz, which luckily does not cause problems for me. My monitor setup is (from left to right):

Monitor 3 (DK2), Monitor 1 (1920x1080, Primary Monitor, 60Hz), Monitor 2 (1280x1024, secondary monitor, 60Hz). You might want to test whether reorganizing your virtual monitors so that DK2 is the leftmost helps, though this is also somewhat unlikely.

Hopefully at least some of this gives you some ideas, if not actually fix your problem.

Oh, forgot to mention, I don't use SweetFX or other tricks mentioned here, I am happy with what the game looks like as-is.

 

[Karnath]

Congrats on the DK2

The only advice i can give is maybe go back to basics, get rid of all the other programs like sweet fx etc and try to get it running correctly as standard

Make sure your running in extended mode and in your Nvidia control panel make sure the rift is set at 75Hz

Have you tried any other games or demo's, do they run ok ?

 

[Darkmark07]

Thanks both - I was suffering from some buyer's remorse before the DK2 arrived but it's the most amazing thing I've ever used for gaming - just hoping that I can get a better experience.

Good call re: the refresh rate being limited by the other screens, I've already got the rift as screen 1 and I've adjusted the resolution on the other monitor so that it will also run at 75Hz. I should mention that the frame rates do sometimes approach 75 fps in SC so it appears that there is nothing limiting the max frame rate, I guess. The rift is running in extended mode also.

I haven't tried any other games or demos yet (I only got back into PC gaming for ED and I get precious little time for that), but I will give that a go to see whether the issues are just ED-related or whether the problems exist elsewhere. Good suggestion, thanks for that

I've already cleared down all the hacks that I could think of, although in retrospect SweetFX is still installed in the ED program folder - will clear that out tonight.

Thanks again

 

[Karnath]

I've already got the rift as screen 1 and I've adjusted the resolution on the other monitor so that it will also run at 75Hz.

I'm unsure if it does make a difference or not, but i recall when i did the initial set up of my DK2 is that it needed to go as the secondary monitor (This may not apply now)

 

[Darkmark07]

I'm unsure if it does make a difference or not, but i recall when i did the initial set up of my DK2 is that it needed to go as the secondary monitor (This may not apply now)

Sorry, should have been clearer, the display is the primary in Windows, in ED it's secondary...

 

[rkodey]

The DDR2 5300 ECC memory caught my interest. I think that memory is going to have a lot less bandwidth than a DDR3 desktop setup. Not sure if the ECC has an added penalty or not. That might be a bottleneck - but I have no idea how to verify it.

 

[Jake_blakeson]

Are your framerates consistently low or do you play for a while and then find the framerates drop, and if you keep playing the framerates speed up again ? Strange place to look but I had a program that was accessing the internet to check for updates, Origin game software, when it tried accessing the net it would drop my framerates and cause juddering. I uninstalled the software and verified that there were no programs running in the background that may try to update themselves and the problem went away. I thought the problem was my CPU\GPU overheating since the issue always occurred about 20 minutes into playing the game, but after seeing a similar problem with another game I play I started looking for other causes. Try making sure you have all unnecessary background software shut off and test again. Probably a long shot, hope it helps.

 

[drkaii]

The DDR2 5300 ECC memory caught my interest. I think that memory is going to have a lot less bandwidth than a DDR3 desktop setup. Not sure if the ECC has an added penalty or not. That might be a bottleneck - but I have no idea how to verify it.

Yeah you beat me to it rkodey. DDR2 is the obvious culprit here. It's 12 years out of date my man. This game uses RAM like any other piece of software. Get 8gb of DDR3

 

[rkodey]

Yeah you beat me to it rkodey. DDR2 is the obvious culprit here. It's 12 years out of date my man. This game uses RAM like any other piece of software. Get 8gb of DDR3

I suspect his Xeons probably won't support DDR3. Check your motherboard specs before buying to make sure.
New motherboard = new CPU(s) = new memory (usually).
(Man, I wish they'd let me update my username on this forum, to something more... fitting...)

 

[Darkmark07]

I suspect his Xeons probably won't support DDR3. Check your motherboard specs before buying to make sure.
New motherboard = new CPU(s) = new memory (usually)

This, unfortunately, only DDR2 and mobo means it has to be ECC and double-buffered.

In ths case it is a complete replacement, including case and PSU as well.

Thanks for your help and suggestions folks, looks like I'll be troubling Amazon and Ebuyer this week!

 

[CMDR Holycow]

So I am finally starting to get a real sense of what is causing judder in this game in the rift... Well, not really what is CAUSING it.. but what brings it on. I have a totally decent system running a 970. There are MANY times, I can get 75 smooth frames even inside stations, running medium settings. When I get out into space, 75 is easy. There is a lot less going on, so my framerate jumps up.

Then last week or the week before, I noticed that even when I am in a station, at the very back, looking at the back wall of the station, if there were more ships in my current instance.. I would get judder! even if my graphics card wasn't rendering anything more than it was before. I still have the same "back wall" of the station sitting in front of me. There are more players in the system, but I am not rendering ANY of them graphically on my screen.

Then last night I decided to make a pilgramage to LSF 3447 (something like that), your most popular starting system... where I myself started. Now... before, I would get my best framerate performance in super cruise... It's always butter smooth. but last night, even in super cruise, in this newb system.. I was getting the worst judder I have ever had, even with settings on rock bottom. Settings on low, or high, it didn't' matter. There were 7 or 8 players in super cruize and I was getting what felt like 15fps. As soon as I would jump to another system... boom 75 again.

I don't think judder is necessarily linked to video card performance at ALL (although it probably could be in some cases). Any idea what it could be? CPUs are not taxed, video card is not taxed. Could it be internet connection speed at that point? I wouldn't think so...

 

[Pate]

Yes, I have suspected for a while now that the main judder problems are not caused by GPU performance (as soon as you generally get 75fps with your GPU).

Perhaps some network code in Elite: Dangerous is not quite asynchronous enough, and that causes the game code to wait for some network-related operation to finish, which causes judder.

Being "out there" exploring has made me pretty much forget what judder is, as there are no other ships around here.

 

[Karnath]

Definitely going to have to agree with the above, running with 2x 970's, when i first got my DK2 i was in a quiet system with no res sites and was happy to grind between a few local systems also out of the way of other players.
Very rarely did i see another CMDR, in my infinite wisdom i decided last night to plot a course to Lave just to tick it off the list so to speak. Well there must of been a good 10 CMDR'S and the judder started, the station was just awful

I had a good play about with the graphical settings while i was at Lave and nothing made a difference to the level of judder, a few jumps later to a quieter system everything returns to normal

 

[Ancan]

<snip>
Perhaps some network code in Elite: Dangerous is not quite asynchronous enough, and that causes the game code to wait for some network-related operation to finish, which causes judder.
<snip>

For the major, irregular juddering this most certainly is it. There's something in the network code making the rest of the system waiting for it now and then. It's much better now than in the beta, but still very noticeable even without the Rift. For me, closing in on popular stations makes the entire display freeze for a quarter of a second or so several times. I assume it's when it loads the instance.

Small, consistent juddering in space stations I've assumed been a performance issue.

 

[Whisanders]

My Hardware setup is very similar to yours but mine is in a Mac pro Chassis and you have a way better graphics card than mine. Only time I have had massive amount of lag is in Lugh, but I think that was down to the amount of CMDR's in the instance and the way P2P was working. I see a slight dip in framerates in the station but is not something too uncomfortable. Looking forward to see how the Rift performs in the game Native under OS X.

 

[Darkmark07]

Interesting; what frame rate are you seeing? It's not a graphics card issue, it seems to be down to the memory bandwidth on my system.

 

[Darkmark07]

Some interesting comparisons here. On the left, my reasonably modest (but modern) work laptop, on the right my less modest (but old) gaming PC...



Side by side comparison of RAM bandwidth suggests that the modern DDR3 RAM gives 3x better throughput at less than half the latency of the the old DDR2 ECC buffered stuff. It looks like we've found the culprit for the poor performance!

Hopefully some courier deliveries over the next couple of days will move me away from the dark (and stuttery) ages...

 

[Jake_blakeson]

I think for ED, FD' s network is a big part of the problem. Even before Wings there was a noticeable frame rate drop when entering a system with other real commanders in it. Although just a nuisance for flat screen players, since the framerates for VR headsets is crucial, it is extremely noticeable for Rift users. Just another hurdle for VR. The more research I do on the subject of VR headsets the more I am convinced that the answer hasn't even been discovered yet. It's great that the VR community is testing all current hardware, and software options to get the best performance out of their VR headsets, but the bottom line is the developers of VR headsets still don't have the answer, so no amount of tweaking on the users parts is going to achieve better results. On a brighter side, it seems that a big part of the problem may be related more to software issues then the hardware design of the VR headsets available right now.
I am waiting for that oh moment, when someone, somewhere discovers the magic bullet that makes it all work.