I think I'm finished trying to play Elite in VR.

[CMDR Muy Bien Gato]

Don't get me wrong, the feeling of actually piloting my ship is unparalleled, but damn, once the novelty wears off you start to only notice the things that are wrong. The performance is just way too unpredictable for this to feel useful or fun. The latest CG in Slink's Eye has really exacerbated all the issues I had with FD's implementation of the Vive. Text legibility is one thing, but as soon as reprojection kicks in (everywhere), it's all over for me. Focusing my attention on a ship as I try and move around giant blurry rocks is very difficult when that movement makes everything appear in twos. The ghosting is just too much for me.

I've also tried everything to find a balance between performance and legibility, and no matter how good the performance may seem at first, Elite will eventually crap out and stutter. At some point I just have to admit defeat and realize that The Cobra Engine is just not optimized for VR. Reprojection and ATW are supposed to be Plan B. A good majority of this game takes place within stations, in planetary rings, and on the surface of planets. None of these locations are playable without the game dipping to 45fps, even if you have a top of the line rig. Even with all the effects off or on low, maintaining a steady 90fps is impossible unless I reduce SS to the point where everything becomes completely illegible again.

This is the best way I can illustrate what an RES is like with reprojection. I haven't experienced Elite in the Rift, but I assume ATW/ASW is better implemented than this. Reprojection is just unbearable.

So yeah. Hopefully Frontier improves this. I dunno. 2.2 has only made it worse, so I've kinda lost hope in that regard.

Love Elite, love FD, love my Vive... but this is just a big ol' bummer. Sorry for the rant, hopefully you guys/gals are getting better performance. Thankfully I have a TrackIR still laying around.

 

[CylonSurfer]

Nope. Same performance issues on my Rift, just stutter when pitching or rolling rather than blurring. Still my favourite game though

 

[Ryder35]

Owning both I can tell you that the rift is night and day better. Vive at anything less than 90fps is horrible. ATW on rift works very well though as said still some judder. Also text in rift is much more redable and there are no where near as many graphical issues as on the vive.

 

[CMDR Muy Bien Gato]

Nope. Same performance issues on my Rift, just stutter when pitching or rolling rather than blurring. Still my favourite game though

What are your specs? That's really disappointing to hear.

There's a lot of conflicting information out there regarding how ED performs in VR. People claimed that 2.2 beta 5 "fixed everything" for the Vive within hours of it launching, and much like ASW, those reports seemed to disappear after a couple days. Of course YMMV, but I think a lot of it is a placebo effect unfortunately.

 

[blastard]

CV1 user here. I get none of the probs that the OP details. I'm only on a 970 and fps does drop to 45ish inside stations/on planet surfaces but its still very playable. Outside stations its nearly always 90fps.
Sadly, after doing some fairly heavy HF tig welding yesterday, in close prox to my pc (all in my garage), I managed to zap the said pc. Corrupted the bios and after hours of checking and swapping out - I've a dead 970 as well (damn EMP's).
CMDR Blastard (currently on shore leave until I can climb back into my ship)

 

[TheSignal]

I've had very few issues with Elite and I'm running a Rift off of a 780 (not even the TI edition). Yesterday I activated ASW and for the first time I've been able to switch Super Sampling up to 1.5 and had zero issues with framerates. Either my tolerance for frame drop is very high or I'm doing something differently, it runs at a buttery smooth 45-60fps now, no 90fps but SS at 1.5 makes text legible atleastm, with SS at one I am at the upper end of the framerate window. I am running Beta versions of my Graphics drivers though (sometimes its worth the occasional crash).

 

[Jypson]

I know exactly how you feel. I gave up on my CV1 after a couple weeks of non-stop tweaking. Either it looks absolutely terrible or dropping frames like crazy.

After hearing about ASW, I decided to give it another shot and it truly was night and day. I don't think I can give full credit to ASW since the latest Nvidia drivers are very-very good for VR as well.

As I posted in a different thread, I can apply Ultra settings with in-game SS 2.0 and have a very smooth and clear experience; in Elite and my other games like Project Cars. I don't have a Vive, so I can't speak to that, but my experience in the CV1 has been much-much improved.

Hopefully our games will get more and more optimized for VR as time goes on, because it really is a game-changer when everything is running on all cylinders.

Here's my PC specs if you're curious.

ASUS Maximus VI
i7 4790K
MSI GTX1080 Sea Hawk X
4x ADATA 4GB DDR3 1600MHZ
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB

 

[Cruise]

I think it's long over due for FD, to make a statement on VR.
The silence, in the face of many frustrated ED fans, is very disappointing.
People have invested a great deal of money in hardware to primarily use for ED.

 

[Kapow]

I'll be able to report my exact findings on my rig on Thursday/Friday (Although I'm sure that others have done so already, I'll happily give my finding as well). I've given up on Vive in ED as the main issue seems that the frame rate is too unpredictable (fault of Frontier) and Reprojection is simply not a good enough solution to combat the issues in ED (Fault of Valve and Steam VR).

The main issue I can see for Vive users is that Valve is betting unhealthy amount of success on the ability of the Game devs to optimize their creations. This might be true for devs like Valve, Epic or Blizzard, but sadly we all know that it isn't industry standard. Oculus has a little more practical opinion and it seems that they have realized that if they want their users to have solid experience they need to allow for some errors on the Devs side and make sure that their SDK can remedy the issues of poor optimization.

As a dev myself I love my Vive and I will carry on using it in my projects and work, but as a gamer I've simply decided to give oculus a shot and run comparison testing on the same rig (Testing on different rigs is not always conclusive. so any past experience I might have will not be taken into account). I've been a loud critic of the Vive support by FD as ED's optimization is not great and leaves a lot to be desired, but I also understand that doing something like adaptive rendering for Cobra would simply cost far to much to be viable, so a part of the blame might be on Valve here for having far too high standards for VR games developers and not giving them enough crutches (ASW/ATW) to give their users a good experience.

 

[[VR] Frank_G]

2.2 brought excellent performance increase to my relatively low spec system. I use a Rift and i was able to tweak most things up to high on a GTX 970, 16 gig with i5 4690. When using the asynchronous space warp function, i can almost play in VR ultra... the training missions, including those in the ice field are running absolutely smooth...

 

[Kellan Fell]

Nope. Same performance issues on my Rift, just stutter when pitching or rolling rather than blurring. Still my favourite game though

I'm using a CV1 with a GTX970, straight out of the box. I just plugged the Rift in and started playing and have never had any issues with it at all...

 

[CylonSurfer]

What are your specs? That's really disappointing to hear.

There's a lot of conflicting information out there regarding how ED performs in VR. People claimed that 2.2 beta 5 "fixed everything" for the Vive within hours of it launching, and much like ASW, those reports seemed to disappear after a couple days. Of course YMMV, but I think a lot of it is a placebo effect unfortunately.

6700k @4.5ghz
Gtx 1080 strix
16gb of ddr4
Os and elite installed on separate SSDs

I had the same issues on my last rig too.... 5820k @ 4.0ghz, GTx 980, 32gb of DDR4.

Most people are glossing over the stutters when pitching and rolling, everyone I have played with say performance is great in VR, get them to do a few simple actions in game and they see the same results as me - they're just happy to overlook it as for me it's stands out and drives me nuts. People claiming to run the game at 2x SS and get butter smooth game play are either easily pleased and overlooking issues or simply talking from where the sun doesn't shine. Nothing wrong with people being happy with the performance they do get, buts it's certainly not up to what they write on here for sure.

I didn't like ASW from the get go, more cons than pro's IMHO. I'd rather the dropped frames and lower settings..and yes more people have started to notice it's flaws. The one side of my SRV body panels wobbled as I drove at speed looking over my sholder this afternoon, I was barely under 90fps with mostly medium settings and no SS. It was bad to look at... I mean wobbled as in the top edge looked like a wave length graph.

 

[eqinox]

TheSignal, did you really get ASW to work on GTX 780, I thought it wasn't supported properly yet?

This would truly make my day, I tried it, but as with many others using a 7xx series card, there was the following error in the Oculus log file (AppData/Local/Oculus/Service_<date>.txt), with ASW was not enabled:

ASW Disabled, reason: 'OVR Error: Code: -3000 -- ovrError_Initialize System error: 8 (8) -- Not enough storage is available to process this command. Description: Encode Session Initialization failed

What graphics driver are you using?

 

[Jypson]

6700k @4.5ghz
Gtx 1080 strix
16gb of ddr4
Os and elite installed on separate SSDs

I had the same issues on my last rig too.... 5820k @ 4.0ghz, GTx 980, 32gb of DDR4.

Most people are glossing over the stutters when pitching and rolling, everyone I have played with say performance is great in VR, get them to do a few simple actions in game and they see the same results as me - they're just happy to overlook it as for me it's stands out and drives me nuts. People claiming to run the game at 2x SS and get butter smooth game play are either easily pleased and overlooking issues or simply talking from where the sun doesn't shine. Nothing wrong with people being happy with the performance they do get, buts it's certainly not up to what they write on here for sure.

I didn't like ASW from the get go, more cons than pro's IMHO. I'd rather the dropped frames and lower settings..and yes more people have started to notice it's flaws. The one side of my SRV body panels wobbled as I drove at speed looking over my sholder this afternoon, I was barely under 90fps with mostly medium settings and no SS. It was bad to look at... I mean wobbled as in the top edge looked like a wave length graph.

I appreciate a healthy dose of skepticism, but decrying others reports because they don't match your own experience isn't helpful to anyone. Like I said in the previous thread, are sure you enabled AWS correctly?

 

[TheSignal]

TheSignal, did you really get ASW to work on GTX 780, I thought it wasn't supported properly yet?

This would truly make my day, I tried it, but as with many others using a 7xx series card, there was the following error in the Oculus log file (AppData/Local/Oculus/Service_<date>.txt), with ASW was not enabled:

ASW Disabled, reason: 'OVR Error: Code: -3000 -- ovrError_Initialize System error: 8 (8) -- Not enough storage is available to process this command. Description: Encode Session Initialization failed

What graphics driver are you using?

I'll be honest I am just assuming its working. Either way I have a decent framerate in game and absolutely smooth experience in the rift, previously It was unplayable at 1.5 SS. Alternatively it could also be the beta driver for my GPU. I've certainly had no issues with running the game or my headset. No errors have come up.

Edit: Turns out no longer on Beta driver so I have no idea what in Cthulhu's name is allowing me to run the game so smooth. Maybe my GPU is just blessed by the elder gods?

Double Edit: ASW isn't running either, just checked that log... . Sorry for the false alarm. As to why my game is playable at 1.5 SS on a 780 (it wasn't previously) and most people seem to be struggling? I am out of ideas. Overclocking? Psychosomatic? My brain is filling in the missing frames? Cthulhu is inhabiting my PC? I wish I could help. Turns out I'm an idiot or a liar.

 

[CMDR Muy Bien Gato]

I'm highly skeptical anyone is getting a steady 90fps in icy rings or in stations, but I'm genuinely curious how ASW handles/prevents ghosting while flying through these troublesome areas. An easy way to tell when reprojection kicks in on the Vive, for instance, is looking down at the little lights by the in-game flight stick and moving my head around. These switches leave a very noticeable trail at 45fps.

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

6700k @4.5ghz
...I didn't like ASW from the get go, more cons than pro's IMHO. I'd rather the dropped frames and lower settings..and yes more people have started to notice it's flaws. The one side of my SRV body panels wobbled as I drove at speed looking over my sholder this afternoon, I was barely under 90fps with mostly medium settings and no SS. It was bad to look at... I mean wobbled as in the top edge looked like a wave length graph.

I have to agree - the visual distortions introduced by ASW, especially around sharp edges/boundaries like the menu lines . Like you, I prefer to see the frame rate drop a bit and even see a bit of judder preferable to visual distortion or loss of detail. Judder doesn't make me sick - I just see it the same way I would in 3D... jerky motion etc and I know the PC is under heavy load.

TheSignal, did you really get ASW to work on GTX 780, I thought it wasn't supported properly yet?

This would truly make my day, I tried it, but as with many others using a 7xx series card, there was the following error in the Oculus log file (AppData/Local/Oculus/Service_<date>.txt), with ASW was not enabled:

ASW Disabled, reason: 'OVR Error: Code: -3000 -- ovrError_Initialize System error: 8 (8) -- Not enough storage is available to process this command. Description: Encode Session Initialization failed

What graphics driver are you using?

Not sure if the 7-series nVidia cards support ASW? I had a 780GTX before upgrading to the 1080. The 780 worked fine - all on med to high settings. ATW worked fine. Good entry level/basic test the waters card with about the same power as the 960. Upgrade after if you need more power. That's what I did.

I'll be honest I am just assuming its working. Either way I have a decent framerate in game and absolutely smooth experience in the rift, previously It was unplayable at 1.5 SS. Alternatively it could also be the beta driver for my GPU. I've certainly had no issues with running the game or my headset. No errors have come up.

Edit: Turns out no longer on Beta driver so I have no idea what in Cthulhu's name is allowing me to run the game so smooth. Maybe my GPU is just blessed by the elder gods?

Double Edit: ASW isn't running either, just checked that log... . Sorry for the false alarm. As to why my game is playable at 1.5 SS on a 780 (it wasn't previously) and most people seem to be struggling? I am out of ideas. Overclocking? Psychosomatic? My brain is filling in the missing frames? Cthulhu is inhabiting my PC? I wish I could help. Turns out I'm an idiot or a liar.

780 will still make good use of ATW. Are you running the debug too at 1.5x SS? How about the in-game SS - is that set at 0.75 or 0.65? For some the loss of image quality at in-game 0.65-0.75 is too much of a bother, but it does improve frame rate, a lot. Textures get thrashed though. :/

 

[[HJ]-RedRaven]

I'm highly skeptical anyone is getting a steady 90fps in icy rings or in stations, but I'm genuinely curious how ASW handles/prevents ghosting while flying through these troublesome areas. An easy way to tell when reprojection kicks in on the Vive, for instance, is looking down at the little lights by the in-game flight stick and moving my head around. These switches leave a very noticeable trail at 45fps.

You'd be right. Possibly Titan owners?

ASW, like ATW appears very good at interpolating the oncoming objects/asteroids etc - when ATW is working, you don't actually notice at all when just looking forward. Advancing or retreating objects look fine in ATW and in ASW as the change is relatively small from frame to frame, and a dropped frame doesn't introduce much error, not enough to notice anyway.

With ATW/ASW, lateral motion, or objects moving laterally to the camera view are the worst offenders. I dont see any wierdness with my joystick or arm-lights, even in high-load situations where I know ATW/ASW is kicking in at least part of or all the time. Its only 90-degree left or right or fast moving objects with high contrast (bright ships, rocks on planets as seen out the side of the SRV at speed) that you notice the objects artifacting. And only for those objects - the rest of the ATW/ASW scene isn't high-contrast or detailed enough to trigger my 'that's not right' sense - just the juddering object itself.

ED is difficult territory, especially for ATW/ASW as its very high contrast - lots of bright objects moving on a black background. Its a worst-case scenario.

I think you need to go back to basics, lose the debug tool pixel density altogether. Even a 1080 doesn't give a judder-free image in any ring, let alone with combat going on etc. I'm using 1.4x in the debug tool and I get some judder in stations, especially the in-station menus/engineer menus when moving laterally left/right.

Some using VR seem particularly sensitive to judder and some are particularly sensitive to a perceived loss in detail in VR. I think you're the former, and dropping your detail settings so at least achieve a decent consistent framerate would be a good move.

A980Ti is no slouch, but its worth just toning your settings down, especially if you find yourself on planets or in rings a lot. Get back to a tolerable level judder-wise, and see what detail you have at that point.

 

[sutex]

Thank you beta testers , I luv these threads... in a few years I'll know which VR to get


http://www.starvr.com/

[video=youtube;0GHI4If43ag]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GHI4If43ag[/video]


Vive Starvr rift , VR is what I'm waiting for

 

[toastytwo]

Got a Titan Pascal coming from a 980ti.
Could up some settings and debug SS and have still some gpu headroom to spare...
But the juddering still appears in the same pattern (pitch/roll)
ASW is nice but the artifacts are unbearable when it could be most useful, on planet surfaces.
Are there really no tweaks to get the game right? How about Win7 instead of 10...?